Steven Pinker The Blank Slate The Modern Denial Of Human Nature

PENGUIN BOOKS

THE BLANK SLATE

Steven Pinker is Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. His
research on visual cognition and the psychology of language has earned prizes
from the National Academy of Sciences and the American Psychological Associ¬
ation. Pinker has also received many awards for his teaching at MIT and for his
books How the Mind Works (which was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize) and
The Language Instinct. He is an elected fellow of several scientific societies, asso¬
ciate editor of Cognition, and a member of the usage panel of the American H er-
itage Dictionary. He has written for The New York Times, Time, The New Yorker,
The New Republic, Slate, and Technology Review.

Praise for The Blank Slate

"Abrilliant and forceful summary... A well-informed and well-written account
of [human] limitations, [written with] a graceful interleaving of scientific and
literary sources [This] fine book helps with a task that we all must begin to
take seriously Can it be that we have finally grown up?”

-Melvin Konner, The American Prospect

"This is a brilliant book. It is beautifully written, and addresses profound issues
with courage and clarity. There is nothing else like it, and it is going to have an
impact that extends well beyond the scientific academy."

-Paul Bloom, Trends in Cognitive Sciences

"Steven Pinker has written an extremely good book-clear, well argued, fair,
learned, tough, witty, humane, stimulating. I only hope that people study it care¬
fully before rising up ideologically against him. If they do, they will see that the
idea of an innately flawed but wonderfully rich human nature is a force for good,
not evil." -Colin McGinn, The Washington Post

"Steven Pinker is a man of encyclopedic knowledge and an incisive style of ar¬
gument. His argument in The Blank Slate is that intellectual life in the West, and
much of our social and political policy, was increasingly dominated through
the twentieth century by a view of human nature that is fundamentally flawed;
that this domination has been backed by something that amounts to academic
terrorism (he does not put it quite so strongly): and that we would benefit

substantially from a more realistic view. Pinker's exposition is thoroughly read¬
able and of enviable clarity. His explanation of such a difficult technical matter
as the analysis of variance and regression in twin studies, for example, would be
very hard to better. He is not afraid of using strong language ... in addition, parts
of the book are delightfully funny."

-John R.G. Turner, The Times Literary Supplement

“Anyone who has read Pinker's earlier books-including How the Mind Works
and The Language Instinct-will rightly guess that his latest effort is similarly
sweeping, erudite, sharply argued, richly footnoted and fun to read. It's also
highly persuasive." -Michael Lemonick, Time

‘ [Pinker] makes his main argument persuasively and with great verve....
The Blank Slate ought to be read by anybody who feels they have had enough of
nature-nurture rows or who thinks they already know where they stand on the

science wars. It could change their minds_If nothing else, Mr. Pinker's book

is a wonderfully readable taster of new research, much of it ingenious, designed
to show that many more of our emotional biases and mental aptitudes than pre¬
viously thought are hard-wired or, to use the old word, innate_This is a

breath of air for a topic that has been politicized for too lang." - The Economist

"[Pinker] wades resolutely into the comforting gloom surrounding these not
quite forbidden topics and calmly, lucidly marshals the facts to ground his strik¬
ingly subversive Darwinian claims-subversive not of any of the things we
properly hold dear but subversive of the phony protective layers of misinforma¬
tion surrounding them. ... My reservations with Pinker’s view [will be resolved]
in the bright light of rational inquiry that he brings to these important topics."

-D an Dennett, The Times Literary Supplement

«The Blank Slate brilliantly delineates the current state of play in the nature-
nurture debate. Read it to understand not just the moral and aesthetic blindness
ofyour friends, but the misguided idealism of nations. Amagnificent and timely
work:' -FayWeldon, The Daily Telegraph

"[Pinker] points us in the direction of a more productive debate, a debate in
which the implications of science are confronted forthrightly and not simply
wished away by politicized scientists."

-Francis Fukuyama, The Wall Street Journal

"The Blank Slate is... a stylish piece of work. I won't say it is better than The
Language Instinct or How the Mind Works, but it is as good-which is very high
praise indeed. What a superb thinker and writer he is: what a role model to
young scientists. And how courageous to buck the liberal trend in science,
while remaining in person the best sort of liberal. Pinker is a star, and the world
of science is lucky to have him."

-Richard Dawkins, The Times Literary Supplement

“The Blank Slate is not dismal at all, but unexpectedly bracing. It feels a bit like
being burgled. You're shocked, your things are gone, but you can’t help thinking
about how you're going to replace them. What Steven Pinker has done is break
into our common human home and steal our illusions:'

-John Morrish, The Independent

“As a brightly lighted path between what we would like to believe and what
we need to know, [The Blank Slate] is required reading. Pinker presents an
unanswerable case for accepting that man can be, as he is, both wired and
free." -Frederic Raphael, LosAngeles Times

"Pinker's thinking and writing are first-rate; maybe even better than that. The
Blank Slate is much-needed, long overdue and-if you are interested in what
might be called the 'human nature wars'-somewhere between that old stand¬
by,'required reading: and downright indispensable. It is unlikely to change the
minds of those who are rigidly committed to the blank slate perspective, but for
anyone whose 'nature' includes even a modicum of open-rnindedness, it should
prove a revelation." -David Barash, Human Nature Review

"Pinker is one of those rare writers who is at once persuasive and comprehen¬
sive, informative and entertaining." -Kevin Shapiro, Commentary

“The fight for a separation of politics from science is an eminently sensible, log¬
ical, and ultimately humanistic task, and it took someone as brave as Pinker to
dedicate himself to it.... [This is a] necessary book, a book that in a more truth¬
ful intellectual climate-one open to the idea that any knowledge about our-
selvescan only enhance our ability to act well and compassionately-would not
have had to be written. In this climate, however, we should be grateful that it
was.” -Daniel Smith, TheBoston Globe

"The Blank Slate deserves to be read carefully and with an open mind ... This
landmark book makes an important contribution to the argument about nature
vs. nurture in humans. Whether or not most readers end up on Pinker's side of
the fence, one can hope that his thoroughness and reasoning will shed light into
the darker corners where research has been suppressed by taboos, and where
freedom of thought and speech have been inhibited by fear of consequences for
asking forbidden questions."

-Nancy Jeannette Friedlander, The San Diego Union-Tribune

"This book is a modern magnum opus. The scholarship alone is mind-boggling,
a monument of careful research, meticulous citation, breadth of input from di¬
verse fields, great writing and humor." -T om Paskal, The Montreal Gazette

"A delightfully provocative read ... A constantly dynamic, if tacit, exchange be¬
tween the author and his readers:' -Patrick Watson, The Globe andMail

"A feast of a book. Pinker's analytical and impish mind ranges from Charles
Darwin to Abigail Van Buren, from scientific studies to Annie Hall ... It will be a
rare reader who agrees with everything in this book. But it is an intelligent book
that says what it means and thinks about what it is saying.... Though much of
the book is about human differences, the bigger idea is inherited similarity-the
'psychological unity ofour species.'It is not a blank slate but a slate with aface-
a face that might be called human nature. When Pinker starts describing it, the
reader will surely recognize it.” -Bruce Ramsey, The Seattle Times

THE BLANK SLATE

The Modern Denial
of Human Nature

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Steven Pinker

PENGUIN BOOKS

To Don, Judy, Leda, and John

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First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin,
a member of Penguin Putnam Inc. 2002
Published in Penguin Books 2003

13579 10 8642

Copyright © Steven Pinker, 2002
All rights reserved

Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint the following copyrighted material. Page 22:
Lyrics from "A Simple Desultory Philippic (or How I Was Robert McNamara'd into Submission)"; copyright
© 1965, Paul Simon; used by permission of the publisher: Paul Simon Music. Page 57: Chart, "Percentage of
Male Deaths Caused by Warfare," from WarBefore Civilization by Lawrence H. Keeley, copyright © 1996
by Oxford University Press, Inc.; used by permission of Oxford University Press, Inc. Page 88: Diagram of the
wiring of the primate visual system from Michael Gazzaniga, The Cognitive Neurosciences, The MIT Press
(1996). Page 179: Lyrics from "Gee, Officer Krupke" by Leonard Bernstein & Stephen Sondheim; © 1956,
Amberson Holdings LLC and Stephen Sondheim; copyright renewed; Leonard Bernstein Music Publishing
Company LLC, publisher; used by permission. Page 199: Diagram, "Turning the Tables;' from Mind Sights
by Roger N. Shepard, © 1990 by Roger N. Shepard; reprinted by permission of Henry Holt and Company,
LLC. "Checker Shadow Illusion" © Edward Adelson, 2002; reprinted with permission. Page 326:

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THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGUED THE HARDCOVER EDITION AS FOLLOWS:

Pinker, Steven, 1954-

The blank slate: the modern denial of human nature / Steven Pinker,
p. em.

Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.

ISBN 0-670-03151-8 (he.)

ISBN 01420.03344 (pbk.)

1. Nature and nurture. 1.Title.

BF341 .P47 2002
155.2’34-dc21 2002022719

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PREFACE

"not another book on nature and nurture! Are there really people out
there who still believe that the mind is a blank slate? Isn't it obvious to anyone
with more than one child, to anyone who has been in a heterosexual relation¬
ship, or to anyone who has noticed that children learn language but house pets
don't, that people are born with certain talents and temperaments? Haven't we
all moved beyond the simplistic dichotomy between heredity and environment
and realized that all behavior comes out of an interaction between the two?"

This is the kind of reaction I got from colleagues when I explained my
plans for this book. At first glance the reaction is not unreasonable. Maybe na¬
ture versus nurture is a dead issue. Anyone familiar with current writings on
mind and behavior has seen claims to the middle ground like these:

If the reader is now convinced that either the genetic or environmental
explanation has won out to the exclusion of the other, we have not done
a sufficiently good job of presenting one side or the other. It seems
highly likely to us that both genes and environment have something to
do with this issue. What might the mix be?Weare resolutely agnostic on
that issue; as far as we can determine, the evidence does not yet justify an
estimate.

This is not going to be one of those books that says everything is
genetic: it isn't. The environment is just as important as the genes. The
things children experience while they are growing up are just as impor¬
tant as the things they are born with.

Even when a behavior is heritable, an individual's behavior is still a
product of development, and thus it has a causal environmental
component. ... The modern understanding of how phenotypes are
inherited through the replication of both genetic and environmental

Preface / vii

conditions suggests that ... cultural traditions-behaviors copied by

children from their parents-are likelyto be crucial.

If you think these are innocuous compromises that show that ev.eryone
has outgrown the nature-nurture debate, think again. The quotations come, in
fact, from three of the most incendiary books of the last decade. The first is
from The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, who argue
that the difference in average IQ scores between American blacks and Ameri¬
can whites has both genetic and environmental causes.' The second is from
The Nurture Assumption by Judith Rich Harris, who argues that children's per¬
sonalities are shaped by their genes as well as by their environments, so simi¬
larities between children and their parents may come from their shared genes
and not just from the effects of parenting. 2 The third is from A Natural History
ofRape by Randy Thornhill and Craig Palmer, who argue that rape is not sim¬
ply a product ofculture but also has roots in the nature of men's sexuality.' For
invoking nurture and nature, not nurture alone, these authors have been pick¬
eted, shouted down, subjected to searing invective in the press, even de¬
nounced in Congress. Others expressing such opinions have been censored,
assaulted, or threatened with criminal prosecution."

The idea that nature and nurture interact to shape some part of the mind
might turn out to be wrong, but it is not wishy-washy or unexceptionable, even
in the twenty-first century, thousands of years after the issue was framed.
When it comes to explaining human thought and behavior, the possibility that
heredity plays any role at all still has the power to shock. To acknowledge
human nature, many think, is to endorse racism, sexism, war, greed, genocide,
nihilism, reactionary politics, and neglect of children and the disadvantaged.
Any claim that the mind has an innate organization strikes people not as a hy¬
pothesis that might be incorrect but as a thought it is immoral to think.

This book is about the moral, emotional, and political colorings of the
concept of human nature in modern life. 1 will retrace the history that led peo¬
ple to see human nature as a dangerous idea, and 1 will try to unsnarl the moral
and political rat's nests that have entangled the idea along the way.Though no
book on human nature can hope to be uncontroversial, I did not write it to be
yet another «explosive"book, as dust jackets tend to say.I am not, as many peo¬
ple assume, countering an extreme «nurture" position with an extreme (ma¬
ture" position, with the truth lying somewhere in between. In some cases, an
extreme environmentalist explanation is correct: which language you speak is
an obvious example, and differences among races and ethnic groups in test
scores may be another. In other cases, such as certain inherited neurological
disorders, an extreme hereditarian explanation is correct. In most cases the
correct explanation will invoke a complex interaction between heredity and
environment: culture is crucial, but culture could not exist without mental

viii / Preface

faculties that allow humans to create and learn culture to begin with. My goal
in this book is not to argue that genes are everything and culture is nothing-
no one believes that-but to explore why the extreme position (that culture is
everything) is so often seen as moderate, and the moderate position is seen as
extreme.

Nor does acknowledging human nature have the political implications so
many fear. It does not, for example, require one to abandon feminism, or to ac¬
cept current levels of inequality or violence, or to treat morality as a fiction.
For the most part I will try not to advocate particular policies or to advance the
agenda of the political left or right. I believe that controversies about policy al¬
most always involve tradeoffs between competing values, and that science is
equipped to identify the tradeoffs but not to resolve them. Many of these
tradeoffs, I will show, arise from features of human nature, and by clarifying
them I hope to make our collective choices, whatever they are, better in¬
formed. If I am an advocate, it is for discoveries about human nature that have
been ignored or suppressed in modern discussions of human affairs.

Why is it important to sort this all out? The refusal to acknowledge human
nature is like the Victorians' embarrassment about sex, only worse: it distorts
our science and scholarship, our public discourse, and our day-to-day lives.
Logicians tell us that a single contradiction can corrupt a set of statements and
allow falsehoods to proliferate through it. The dogma that human nature does
not exist, in the face of evidence from science and common sense that it does,
is just such a corrupting influence.

First, the doctrine that the mind is a blank slate has distorted the study of
human beings, and thus the public and private decisions that are guided by that
research. Many policies on parenting, for example, are inspired by research that
finds a correlation between the behavior of parents and the behavior of chil¬
dren. Loving parents have confident children, authoritative parents (neither
too permissive nor too punitive) have well-behaved children, parents who talk
to their children have children with better language skills, and so on. Everyone
concludes that to grow the best children, parents must be loving, authoritative,
and talkative, and if children don't turn out well it must be the parents' fault.
But the conclusions depend on the belief that children are blank slates. Parents,
remember, provide their children with genes, not just a home environment.
The correlations between parents and children may be telling us only that the
same genes that make adults loving, authoritative, and talkative make their
children self-confident, well-behaved, and articulate. Until the studies are re¬
done with adopted children (who get only their environment, not their genes,
from their parents), the data are compatible with the possibility that genes
make all the difference, the possibility that parenting makes all the difference,
or anything in between. Yetin almost every instance, the most extreme posi-
tion-that parents are everything-is the only one researchers entertain.

Preface / ix

The taboo on human nature has not just put blinkers on researchers but
turned any discussion of it into a heresy that must be stamped out. Many writ¬
ers are so desperate to discredit any suggestion of an innate human constitu¬
tion that they have thrown logic and civility out the window. Elementary
distinctions-"some" versus "all;' "probable" versus "always:' «is" versus
"ought"-are eagerly flouted to paint human nature as an extremist doctrine
and thereby steer readers away from it. The analysis of ideas is commonly re¬
placed by political smears and personal attacks. This poisoning of the intellec¬
tual atmosphere has left us unequipped to analyze pressing issues about
human nature just as new scientific discoveries are making them acute.

The denial of human nature has spread beyond the academy and has led
to a disconnect between intellectual life and common sense. I first had the idea
of writing this book when I started a collection of astonishing claims from
pundits and social critics about the malleability of the human psyche: that lit¬
tle boys quarrel and fight because they are encouraged to do so; that children
enjoy sweets because their parents use them as a reward for eating vegetables;
that teenagers get the idea to compete in looks and fashion from spelling bees
and academic prizes; that men think the goal of sex is an orgasm because of
the way they were socialized. The problem is not just that these claims are pre¬
posterous but that the writers did not acknowledge they were saying things
that common sense might call into question. This is the mentality of a cult, in
which fantastical beliefs are flaunted as proof of one's piety. That mentality
cannot coexist with an esteem for the truth, and I believe it is responsible for
some of the unfortunate trends in recent intellectual life. One trend is a stated
contempt among many scholars for the concepts of truth, logic, and evidence.
Another is a hypocritical divide between what intellectuals say in public and
what they really believe. A third is the inevitable reaction: a culture of "politi¬
cally incorrect" shock jocks who revel in anti-intellectualism and bigotry, em¬
boldened by the knowledge that the intellectual establishment has forfeited
claims to credibility in the eyes of the public.

Finally, the denial of human nature has not just corrupted the world of
critics and intellectuals but has done harm to the lives of real people. The the¬
ory that parents can mold their children like clay has inflicted childrearing
regimes on parents that are unnatural and sometimes cruel. It has distorted
the choices faced by mothers as they try to balance their lives,and multiplied the
anguish of parents whose children haven't turned out the way they hoped. The
belief that human tastes are reversible cultural preferences has led social plan¬
ners to write off people's enjoyment of ornament, natural light, and human
scale and force millions of people to live in drab cement boxes. The romantic
notion that all evil is a product of society has justified the release of dangerous
psychopaths who promptly murdered innocent people. And the conviction

x / Preface

that humanity could be reshaped by massive social engineering projects led to
some of the greatest atrocities in history.

Though many of my arguments will be coolly analytical-that an ac¬
knowledgment of human nature does not, logically speaking, imply the nega¬
tive outcomes so many people fear-I will not try to hide my belief that they
have a positive thrust as well. "Man will become better when you show him
what he is like:' wrote Chekhov, and so the new sciences of human nature can
help lead the way to a realistic, biologically informed humanism. They expose
the psychological unity of our species beneath the superficial differences of
physical appearance and parochial culture. They make us appreciate the won¬
drous complexity of the human mind, which we are apt to take for granted
precisely because it works so well. They identify the moral intuitions that we
can put to work in improving our lot. They promise a naturalness in human
relationships, encouraging us to treat people in terms of how they do feel
rather than how some theory says they ought to feel. They offer a touchstone
by which we can identify suffering and oppression wherever they occur, un¬
masking the rationalizations of the powerful. They give us a way to see
through the designs of self-appointed social reformers who would liberate us
from our pleasures. They renew our appreciation for the achievements of
democracy and of the rule of law. And they enhance the insights of artists and
philosophers who have reflected on the human condition for millennia.

An honest discussion of human nature has never been more timely.
Throughout the twentieth century, many intellectuals tried to rest principles
of decency on fragile factual claims such as that human beings are biologically
indistinguishable, harbor no ignoble motives, and are utterly free in their abil¬
ity to make choices. These claims are now being called into question by dis¬
coveries in the sciences of mind, brain, genes, and evolution. If nothing else,
the completion of the Human Genome Project, with its promise of an un-
precedentedunderstanding of the genetic roots of the intellect and the emo¬
tions, should serve as a wake-up call. The new scientific challenge to the denial
of human nature leaves us with a challenge. If we are not to abandon values
such as peace and equality, or our commitments to science and truth, then we
must pry these values away from claims about our psychological makeup that
are vulnerable to being proven false.

This book is for people who wonder where the taboo against human na¬
ture came from and who are willing to explore whether the challenges to the
taboo are truly dangerous or just unfamiliar. It is for those'who are curious
about the emerging portrait of our species and curious about the legitimate
criticisms of that portrait. It is for those who suspect that the taboo against
human nature has left us playing without a full deck as we deal with the press¬
ing issues confronting us. And it is for those who recognize that the sciences of

Preface / xi

mind, brain, genes, and evolution are permanently changing our view of our¬
selves and wonder whether the values we hold precious will wither, survive, or
(as I will argue) be enhanced.

Itis a pleasure to acknowledge the friends and colleagues who improved this
book in innumerable ways. Helena Cronin, Judith Rich Harris, Geoffrey
Miller, Orlando Patterson, and Donald Symons offered deep and insightful
analyses of every aspect, and I can only hope that the final version is worthy of
their wisdom. I profited as well from invaluable comments by Ned Block,
David Buss, Nazli Choucri, Leda Cosmides, Denis Dutton, Michael Gazzaniga,
David Geary, George Graham, Paul Gross, Marc Hauser, Owen Jones, David
Kemmerer, David Lykken, Gary Marcus, Roslyn Pinker, Robert Plornin, James
Rachels, Thomas Sowell, John Tooby, Margo Wilson, and William Zimmer¬
man. My thanks also go to the colleagues who reviewed chapters in their areas
of expertise: Josh Cohen, Richard Dawkins, Ronald Green, Nancy Kanwisher,
Lawrence Katz, Glenn Loury, Pauline Maier, Anita Patterson, Mriganka Sur,
and Milton J. Wilkinson.

I thank many others who graciously responded to requests for informa¬
tion or offered suggestions that found their way into the book: Mahzarin Ba-
naji, Chris Bertram, Howard Bloom, Thomas Bouchard, Brian Boyd, Donald
Brown, Jennifer Campbell, Rebecca Cann, Susan Carey, Napoleon Chagnon,
Martin Daly, Irven DeVore, Dave Evans, Jonathan Freedman, Jennifer Ganger,
Howard Gardner, Tamar Gendler, Adam Gopnik, Ed Hagen, David Housman,
Tony Ingram, William Irons, Christopher Jencks, Henry Jenkins, Jim Johnson,
Erica long, Douglas Kenrick, Samuel Jay Keyser, Stephen Kosslyn, Robert
Kurzban, George Lakoff, Eric Lander, Loren Lomasky, Martha Nussbaum,
Mary Parlee, Larry Squire, Wendy Steiner, Randy Thornhill, James Watson,
Torsten Wiesel, and Robert Wright.

The themes of this book were first presented at forums whose hosts and
audiences provided vital feedback. They include the Center for Bioethics at the
University of Pennsylvania; the Cognition, Brain, and Art Symposium at the
Getty Research Institute; the Developmental Behavior Genetics conference at
the University of Pittsburgh; the Human Behavior and Evolution Society; the
Humane Leadership Project at the University of Pennsylvania; the Institute on
Race and Social Division at Boston University; the School of Humanities, Arts,
and Social Sciences at MIT; the Neurosciences Research Program at the Neu¬
rosciences Institute; the Positive Psychology Summit; the Society for Evolu¬
tionary Analysis in Law; and the Tanner Lectures on Human Values at Yale
University.

I am happy to acknowledge the superb environment for teaching and in¬
quiry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the support of Mrig¬
anka Sur, head of the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Robert

xii / Preface

Silbey,dean of the School of Science, Charles Vest,president of MIT, and many
colleagues and students. John Bearley, the librarian of the Teuber Library,
tracked down scholarly materials and answers to questions no matter how ob¬
scure. I also gratefully acknowledge the financial support ofthe MIT MacVicar
Faculty Fellows program and the Peter de Florez chair. My research on lan¬
guage is supported by NIH Grant HD18381.

Wendy Wolf at Viking Penguin and Stefan McGrath at Penguin Books
provided excellent advice and welcome good cheer. I thank them and my
agents, John Brockman and Katinka Matson, for their efforts on behalf of the
book. I am delighted that Katya Rice agreed to copy-edit this book, our fifth
collaboration.

My heartfelt appreciation goes to my family, the Pinkers, Boodmans, and
Subbiah-Adamses, for their love and support. Special thanks to my wife, Ilave-
nil Subbiah, for her wise advice and loving encouragement.

This book is dedicated to four people who have been dear friends and pro¬
found influences: Donald Symons, Judith Rich Harris, Leda Cosmides, and
John Tooby.

Preface / xiii

CONTENTS

PREFACE vii

PART I The Blank Slate, the Noble Savage,

and the Ghost in the Machine 1

Chapter 1 The Official Theory 5

Chapter 2 Silly Putty 14

Chapter 3 The Last Wall to Fall 30

Chapter 4 Culture Vultures 59

Chapter 5 The Slate's Last Stand 73

PART II Fear and Loathing 103

Chapter 6 Political Scientists 105

Chapter 7 The Holy Trinity 121

PART III Human Nature with a Human Face 137

Chapter 8 The Fear of Inequality 141

Chapter 9 The Fear of Imperfectibility 159

Chapter 10 The Fear of Determinism 174

Chapter 11 The Fear of Nihilism 186

PART IV Know Thyself 195

Chapter 12 In Touch with Reality 197

Chapter 13 Out of Our Depths 219

Chapter 14 The Many Roots of Our Suffering 241

Chapter 15 The Sanctimonious Animal 269

PART V Hot Buttons 281

Chapter 16 Politics 283

Chapter 17 Violence jq6

Chapter 18 Gender 337

Chapter 19 Children 372

Chapter 20 The Arts 400

PART VI The Voice of the Species 42 j

A p pen D 1 x: Donald E. Brown's List of Human Universals 435

NOTES 44|

REFERENCES 444

INDEX 491

xvi / Contents

THE BLANK

SLATE

PART I

THE BLANK SLATE, THE NOBLE
SAVAGE, AND THE GHOST
IN THE MACHINE

E veryone has a theory of human nature. Everyone has to anticipate the
behavior of others, and that means we all need theories about what
inakes people tick. A tacit theory of human nature-that behavior is
caused by thoughts and feelings-is embedded in the very way we think about
people. We fill out this theory by introspecting on our own minds and assum¬
ing that our fellows are like ourselves, and by watching people's behavior
and filing away generalizations. We absorb still other ideas from our intellec¬
tual climate: from the expertise of authorities and the conventional wisdom of
the day.

Our theory of human nature is the wellspring of much in our lives. We
consult it when we want to persuade or threaten, inform or deceive. It advises
us on how to nurture our marriages, bring up our children, and control our
own behavior. Its assumptions about learning drive our educational policy; its
assumptions about motivation drive our policies on economics, law, and
crime. And because it delineates what people can achieve easily, what they can
achieve only with sacrifice or pain, and what they cannot achieve at all, it af¬
fects our values: what we believe we can reasonably strive for as individuals
and as a society. Rival theories of human nature are entwined in different ways
of life and different political systems, and have been a source of much conflict
over the course of history.

For millennia, the major theories of human nature have come from reli¬
gion.' The Judeo-Christian tradition, for example, offers explanations for
much of the subject matter now studied by biology and psychology. Humans
are made in the image of God and are unrelated to animals.' Women are de¬
rivative of men and destined to be ruled by them.' The mind is an immaterial
substance: it has powers possessed by no purely physical structure, and can
continue to exist when the body dies." The mind is made up of several com¬
ponents, including a moral sense, an ability to love, a capacity for reason that
recognizes whether an act conforms to ideals of goodness, and a decision

The Blank Slate, the Noble Savage, and the Ghost in the Machine /1

faculty that chooses how to behave. Although the decision faculty is not bound
by the laws of cause and effect, it has an innate tendency to choose sin. Our
cognitive and perceptual faculties work accurately because God implanted
ideals in them that correspond to reality and because he coordinates their
functioning with the outside world. Mental health comes from recognizing
God's purpose, choosing good and repenting sin, and loving God and one’s
fellow humans for God's sake.

The Judeo-Christian theory is based on events narrated in the Bible. We
know that the human mind has nothing in common with the minds of ani¬
mals because the Bible says that humans were created separately. We know that
the design of women is based on the design of men because in the second
telling of the creation of women Eve was fashioned from the rib of Adam.
Human decisions cannot be the inevitable effects of some cause, we may sur¬
mise, because God held Adam and Eve responsible for eating the fruit of the
tree of knowledge, implying that they could have chosen otherwise. Women
are dominated by men as punishment for Eve’s disobedience, and men and
women inherit the sinfulness of the first couple.

The Iudeo-Christian conception is still the most popular theory of human
nature in the United States. According to recent polls, 76 percent of Americans
believe in the biblical account of creation, 79 percent believe that the miracles
in the Bible actually took place, 76 percent believe in angels, the devil, and
other immaterial souls, 67 percent believe they will exist in some form after
their death, and only 15 percent believe that Darwin's theory of evolution is
the best explanation for the origin of human life on Earth." Politicians on the
right embrace the religious theory explicitly, and no mainstream politician
would dare contradict it in public. But the modern sciences of cosmology, ge¬
ology, biology, and archaeology have made it impossible for a scientifically lit¬
erate person to believe that the biblical story of creation actually took place. As
a result, the Judeo-Christian theory of human nature is no longer explicitly
avowed by most academics, journalists, social analysts, and other intellectually
engaged people.

Nonetheless, every society must operate with a theory of human nature,
and our intellectual mainstream is committed to another one. The theory is
seldom articulated or overtly embraced, but it lies at the heart of a vast num¬
ber of beliefs and policies. Bertrand Russell wrote, "Every man, wherever he
goes, is encompassed by a cloud of comforting convictions, which move with
him like flies on a summer day." For intellectuals today, many of those convic¬
tions are about psychology and social relations. I will refer to those convictions
as the Blank Slate: the idea that the human mind has no inherent structure and
can be inscribed at will by society or ourselves.

That theory of human nature-namely, that it barely exists-is the topic
of this book. Just as religions contain a theory of human nature, so theories of

2 / The Blank Slate, the Noble Savage, and the Ghost in the Machine

human nature take on some of the functions of religion, and the Blank Slate
has become the secular religion of modern intellectual life. It is seen as a source
of values, so the fact that it is based on a miracle-a complex mind arising out
of nothing-is not held against it. Challenges to the doctrine from skeptics
and scientists have plunged some believers into a crisis of faith and nave led
others to mount the kinds of bitter attacks ordinarily aimed at heretics and in¬
fidels. And just as many religious traditions eventually reconciled themselves
to apparent threats from science (such as the revolutions of Copernicus and
Darwin), so, I argue, will our values survive the demise of the Blank Slate.

The chapters in this part of the book (Part I) are about the ascendance of
the Blank Slate in modern intellectual life, and about the new view of human
nature and culture that is beginning to challenge it. In succeeding parts we will
witness the anxiety evoked by this challenge (Part II) and see how the anxiety
may be assuaged (Part III). Then I will show how a richer conception of
human nature can provide insight into language, thought, social life, and
morality (Part IV) and how it can clarify controversies on politics, violence,
gender, childrearing, and the arts (Part V). Finally I will show how the passing
of the Blank Slate is less disquieting, and in some ways less revolutionary, than
it first appears (Part VI).

The Blank Slate, the Noble Savage, and the Ghost in the Machine / 3

Chapter 1

The Official Theory

"BLANK SLATE" IS a loose translation of the medieval Latin term tabula
rasa-literally, "scraped tablet.” It is commonly attributed to the philosopher
John Locke (1632-1704), though in fact he used a different metaphor. Here is
the famous passage from An Essay Concerning Human Understanding:

Let us then suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper void of all
characters, without any ideas. How comes it to be furnished? Whence
comes it by that vast store which the busy and boundless fancy of man
has painted on it with an almost endless variety? Whence has it all the
materials of reason and knowledge? To this I answer, in one word, from

EXPERIENCE. 1

Locke was taking aim at theories of innate ideas in which people were thought
to be born with mathematical ideals, eternal truths, and a notion of God. His
alternative theory, empiricism, was intended both as a theory of psychology-
how the mind works-and as a theory of epistemology-how we come to
know the truth. Both goals helped motivate his political philosophy, often
honored as the foundation ofliberal democracy. Locke opposed dogmatic jus¬
tifications for the political status quo, such as the authority of the church and
the divine right ofkings, which had been touted as self-evident truths. He ar¬
gued that social arrangements should be reasoned out from scratch and
agreed upon by mutual consent, based on knowledge that any person could
acquire. Since ideas are grounded in experience, which varies from person to
person, differences of opinion arise not because one mind is equipped to grasp
the truth and another is defective, but because the two minds have had differ¬
ent histories. Those differences therefore ought to be tolerated rather than
suppressed. Locke's notion of a blank slate also undermined a hereditary roy¬
alty and aristocracy, whose members could claim no innate wisdom or merit
if their minds had started out as blank as everyone else's. It also spoke against

The Official Theory / 5

the institution of slavery, because slaves could no longer be thought of as in¬
nately inferior or subservient.

During the past century the doctrine of the Blank Slate has set the agenda
for much of the social sciences and humanities. As we shall see, psychology has
sought to explain all thought, feeling, and behavior with a few simple mecha¬
nisms of learning. The social sciences have sought to explain all customs and
social arrangements as a product of the socialization of children by the sur¬
rounding culture: a system of words, images, stereotypes, role models, and
contingencies of reward and punishment. A long and growing list of concepts
that would seem natural to the human way of thinking (emotions, kinship, the
sexes, illness, nature, the world) are now said to have been "invented" or ('so¬
cially constructed,'?

The Blank Slate has also served as a sacred scripture for political and eth¬
ical beliefs. According to the doctrine, any differences we see among races,
ethnic groups, sexes, and individuals come not from differences in their
innate constitution but from differences in their experiences. Change the
experiences-by reforming parenting, education, the media, and social
rewards-and you can change the person. Underachievement, poverty, and
antisocial behavior can be ameliorated; indeed, it is irresponsible not to do
so. And discrimination on the basis of purportedly inborn traits of a sex or
ethnic group is simply irrational.

THE BLANK SLATE is often accompanied by two other doctrines, which have
also attained a sacred status in modern intellectual life. My label for the first of
the two is commonly attributed to the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau
(1712-1778), though it really comes from John Dryden's The Conquest of
Granada, published in 1670:

I am as free as Nature first made man.

Ere the base laws of servitude began.

When wild in woods the noble savage ran.

The concept of the noble savage was inspired by European colonists' dis¬
covery of indigenous peoples in the Americas, Africa, and (later) Oceania. It
captures the belief that humans in their natural state are selfless, peaceable,
and untroubled, and that blights such as greed, anxiety, and violence are the
products of civilization. In 1755 Rousseau wrote:

So many authors have hastily concluded that man is naturally cruel, and
requires a regular system of police to be reclaimed; whereas nothing can
be more gentle than him in his primitive state, when placed by nature at

6 /The Blank Slate, the Noble Savage, and the Ghost in the Machine

an equal distance from the stupidity of brutes and the pernicious good
sense of civilized man....

The more we reflect on this state, the more convinced we shall be
that it was the least subject of any to revolutions, the best for man, and
that nothing could have drawn him out of it but some fatal accident,
which, for the public good, should never have happened. The example
of the savages, most of whom have been found in this condition, seems
to confirm that mankind was formed ever to remain in it, that this con¬
dition is the real youth of the world, and that all ulterior improvements
have been so many steps, in appearance towards the perfection of indi¬
viduals, but in fact towards the decrepitness of the species.’

First among the authors that Rousseau had in mind was Thomas Hobbes
(1588-1679), who had presented a very different picture:

Hereby it is manifest, that during the time men live without a common
power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called
war; and such a war as is of every man against every man....

In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit
thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navi¬
gation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no
commodious building; no instruments of moving and removing such
things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no
account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all,
continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary,
poor, nasty,brutish, and short. 4

Hobbes believed that people could escape this hellish existence only by sur¬
rendering their autonomy to a sovereign person or assembly. He called it a
leviathan, the Hebrew word for a monstrous sea creature subdued by Yahweh
at the dawn of creation.

Much depends on which of these armchair anthropologists is correct. If
people are noble savages, then a domineering leviathan is unnecessary. Indeed,
by forcing people to delineate private property for the state to recognize-
property they might otherwise have shared-the leviathan creates the very
greed and belligerence it is designed to control. A happy society would be our
birthright; all we would need to do is eliminate the institutional barriers that
keep it from us. If, in contrast, people are naturally nasty, the best we can hope
for is an uneasy truce enforced by police and the army. The two theories have
implications for private life as well. Every child is born a savage (that is, unciv¬
ilized), so if savages are naturally gentle, childrearing is a matter of providing

The Official Theory / 7

children with opportunities to develop their potential, and evil people are
products of a society that has corrupted them. If savages are naturally nasty,
then childrearing is an arena of discipline and conflict, and evil people are
showing a dark side that was insufficiently tamed.

The actual writings of philosophers are always more complex than the
theories they come to symbolize in the textbooks. In reality, the views of
Hobbes and Rousseau are not that far apart. Rousseau, like Hobbes, believed
(incorrectly) that savages were solitary, without ties of love or loyalty, and
without any industry or art (and he may have out-Hobbes'd Hobbes in claim¬
ing they did not even have language). Hobbes envisioned-indeed, literally
drew-his leviathan as an embodiment of the collective will, which was vested
in it by a kind of social contract; Rousseau's most famous work is called The
Social Contract, and in it he calls on people to subordinate their interests to a
"general will."

Nonetheless, Hobbes and Rousseau limned contrasting pictures of the
state of nature that have inspired thinkers in the centuries since. No one can
fail to recognize the influence of the doctrine of the Noble Savage in contem¬
porary consciousness. We see it in the current respect for all things natural
(natural foods, natural medicines, natural childbirth) and the distrust of the
man-made, the unfashionability of authoritarian styles of childrearing and
education, and the understanding of social problems as repairable defects in
our institutions rather than as tragedies inherent to the human condition.

THE other SACRED doctrine that often accompanies the Blank Slate is usu¬
ally attributed to the scientist, mathematician, and philosopher Rene
Descartes (1596-1650):

There is a great difference between mind and body, inasmuch as body is
by nature always divisible, and the mind is entirely indivisible.... When
I consider the mind, that is to say, myself inasmuch as I am only a think¬
ing being, I cannot distinguish in myself any parts, but apprehend my¬
self to be clearly one and entire; and though the whole mind seems to be
united to the whole body, yet if a foot, or an arm, or some other part, is
separated from the body, I am aware that nothing has been taken from
my mind. And the faculties of willing, feeling, conceiving, etc. cannot be
properly speaking said to be its parts, for it is one and the same mind
which employs itself in willing and in feeling and understanding. But it
is quite otherwise with corporeal or extended objects, for there is not
one of them imaginable by me which my mind cannot easily divide into
parts.... This would be sufficient to teach me that the mind or soul of
man is entirely different from the body, if I had not already been ap¬
prised of it on other grounds."

8/The Blank Slate, the Noble Savage, and the Ghost in the Machine

A memorable name for this doctrine was given three centuries later by a
detractor, the philosopher Gilbert Ryle (1900-1976):

There is a doctrine about the nature and place of minds which is so
prevalent among theorists and even among laymen that it deserves to be
described as the official theory.... The official doctrine, which hails
chiefly from Descartes, is something like this. With the doubtful excep¬
tion of idiots and infants in arms every human being has both a body
and a mind. Some would prefer to say that every human being is both a
body and a mind. His body and his mind are ordinarily harnessed to¬
gether, but after the death of the body his mind may continue to exist
and function. Human bodies are in space and are subject to mechanical
laws which govern all other bodies in space.... But minds are not in

space, nor are their operations subject to mechanical laws.

.. . Such in outline is the official theory. I shall often speak of it,
with deliberate abusiveness, as "the dogma of the Ghost in the Ma¬
chine."

The Ghost in the Machine, like the Noble Savage, arose in part as a reac¬
tion to Hobbes. Hobbes had argued that life and mind could be explained in
mechanical terms. Light sets our nerves and brain in motion, and that is what
it means to see. The motions may persist like the wake of a ship or the vibra¬
tion of a plucked string, and that is what it means to imagine. "Quantities" get
added or subtracted in the brain, and that is what it means to think.

Descartes rejected the idea that the mind could operate by physical prin¬
ciples. He thought that behavior, especially speech, was not caused by any¬
thing, but freely chosen. He observed that our consciousness, unlike our bodies
and other physical objects, does not feel as if it is divisible into parts or laid out
in space. He noted that we cannot doubt the existence of our minds-indeed,
we cannot doubt that we areour minds-because the very act ofthinking pre¬
supposes that our minds exist. But we can doubt the existence of our bodies,
because we can imagine ourselves to be immaterial spirits who merely dream
or hallucinate that we are incarnate.

Descartes also found a moral bonus in his dualism (the belief that the
mind is a different kind of thing from the body): "There is none which is more
effectual in leading feeble spirits from the straight path ofvirtue, than to imag¬
ine that the soul of the brute is of the same nature as our own, and that in con¬
sequence, after this life we have nothing to fear or to hope for, any more than
the flies and the ants."? Ryle explains Descartes's dilemma:

When Galileo showed that his methods of scientific discovery were
competent to provide a mechanical theory which should cover every

The Official Theory / 9

occupant of space, Descartes found in himself two conflicting motives.

As a man of scientific genius he could not but endorse the claims of me¬
chanics, yet as a religious and moral man he could not accept, as Hobbes
accepted, the discouraging rider to those claims, namely that human na¬
ture differs only in degree of complexity from clockwork. 8

It can indeed be upsetting to think of ourselves as glorified gears and
springs. Machines are insensate, built to be used, and disposable; humans are
sentient, possessing of dignity and rights, and infinitely precious. A machine
has some workaday purpose, such as grinding grain or sharpening pencils; a
human being has higher purposes, such as love, worship, good works, and the
creation of knowledge and beauty. The behavior of machines is determined by
the ineluctable laws of physics and chemistry; the behavior of people is freely
chosen. With choice comes freedom, and therefore optimism about our possi¬
bilities for the future. With choice also comes responsibility, which allows us to
hold people accountable for their actions. And of course if the mind is separate
from the body, it can continue to exist when the body breaks down, and our
thoughts and pleasures will not someday be snuffed out forever.

As I mentioned, most Americans continue to believe in an immortal soul,
made of some nonphysical substance, which can part company with the body.
But even those who do not avow that belief in so many words still imagine that
somehow there must be more to us than electrical and chemical activity in the
brain. Choice, dignity, and responsibility are gifts that set off human beings
from everything else in the universe, and seem incompatible with the idea that
we are mere collections of molecules. Attempts to explain behavior in mecha¬
nistic terms are commonly denounced as "reductionist" or «determinist." The
denouncers rarely know exactly what they mean by those words, but everyone
knows they refer to something bad. The dichotomy between mind and body
also pervades everyday speech, as when we say «Use your head;' when we refer
to «out-of-body experiences;' and when we speak of«John's body," or for that
matter «John's brain;' which presupposes an owner, John, that is somehow
separate from the brain it owns. Journalists sometimes speculate about «brain
transplants" when they really should be calling them «body transplants," be¬
cause, as the philosopher Dan Dennett has noted, this is the one transplant op¬
eration in which it is better to be the donor than the recipient.

The doctrines of the Blank Slate, the Noble Savage, and the Ghost in the
Machine-or, as philosophers call them, empiricism, romanticism, and dual-
ism-are logically independent, but in practice they are often found together.
If the slate is blank, then strictly speaking it has neither injunctions to do good
nor injunctions to do evil. But good and evil are asymmetrical: there are more
ways to harm people than to help them, and harmful acts can hurt them to a

101 The Blank Slate, the Noble Savage, and the Ghost in the Machine

greater degree than virtuous acts can make them better off. So a blank slate,
compared with one filled with motives, is bound to impress us more by its in¬
ability to do harm than by its inability to do good. Rousseau did not literally
believe in a blank slate, but he did believe that bad behavior is a product of
learning and socialization." "Men are wicked;' he wrote; «a sad and constant
experience makes proofunnecessary."ioBut this wickedness comes from soci¬
ety: "There is no original perversity in the human heart. There is not a single
vice to be found in it ofwhich it cannot be said how and whence it entered,"!'
If the metaphors in everyday speech are a clue, then all of us, like Rousseau, as¬
sociate blankness with virtue rather than with nothingness. Think of the
moral connotations of the adjectives clean, fair, immaculate, lily-white, pure,
spotless, unmarred, and unsullied, and of the nouns blemish, blot, mark, stain,
and taint.

The Blank Slate naturally coexists with the Ghost in the Machine, too,
since a slate that is blank is a hospitable place for a ghost to haunt. If a ghost is
to be at the controls, the factory can ship the device with a minimum ofparts.
The ghost can read the body's display panels and pull its levers, with no need
for a high-tech executive program, guidance system, or CPU. The more not-
clockwork there is controlling behavior, the less clockwork we need to posit.
For similar reasons, the Ghost in the Machine happily accompanies the Noble
Savage. If the machine behaves ignobly, we can blame the ghost, which freely
chose to carry out the iniquitous acts; we need not probe for a defect in the
machine's design.

PHILOSOPHY TO "DAY GETS no "respect. Many scientists use the term as a syn¬
onym for effete speculation. When my colleague Ned Block told his father that
he would major in the subject, his father's reply was "Luft!"-Yiddish for "air."
And then there's the joke in which a young man told his mother he would be¬
come a Doctor ofPhilosophy and she said, "Wonderful! But what kind of dis¬
ease is philosophy?"

But far from being idle or airy, the ideas of philosophers can have reper¬
cussions for centuries. The Blank Slate and its companion doctrines have in¬
filtrated the conventional wisdom of our civilization and have repeatedly
surfaced in unexpected places. William Godwin (1756-1835), one of the
founders of liberal political philosophy, wrote that "children are a sort of raw
material put into our hands;’ their minds "like a sheet of white paper." 12 More
sinisterly, we find Mao Zedong justifying his radical social engineering by say¬
ing, "It is on a blank page that the most beautifulpoems are written.I’? Even
Walt Disney was inspired by the metaphor. "I think of a child's mind as a blank
book;' he wrote. "During the first years of his life, much will be written on the
pages. The quality of that writing will affect his life profoundly"!"

The Official Theory /II

Locke could not have imagined that his words would someday lead to
Bambi (intended by Disney to teach self-reliance); nor could Rousseau have
anticipated Pocahontas, the ultimate noble savage. Indeed, the soul of
Rousseau seems to have been channeled by the writer of a recent Thanksgiv¬
ing op-ed piece in the Boston Globe:

I would submit that the world native Americans knew was more stable,
happier, and less barbaric than our society today_there were no em¬

ployment problems, community harmony was strong, substance abuse
unknown, crime nearly nonexistent. What warfare there was between
tribes was largely ritualistic and seldom resulted in indiscriminate or
wholesale slaughter. While there were hard times, life was, for the most
part, stable and predictable.... Because the native people respected
what was around them, there was no loss of water or food resources be¬
cause of pollution or extinction, no lack of materials for the daily essen¬
tials, such as baskets, canoes, shelter, or firewood. 15

Not that there haven't been skeptics;

HOPE.' I'VE DECIDED TO BE. A

“UONTER GATHERER." WHEN I
EBON UP.' I'LL BE LIMING-
W A TROPICAL FOREST, SUBSISTING
ON BERRIES, GRU85, AND THE
OCCASIONAL FROG. AND SPENDING
Kt FREE TINE SROOWtNG WR IKE

AIL THE EXPERTS
SAT ITS BAD
PARENTING TO
SQUELCH A RlDS / 2L 1
AMBITIONS. ' ~

Calvin and Hobbes© Watterson. Reprinted with permission of Universal Press Syndicate.

All rights reserved.

The third doctrine, too, continues to make its presence felt in modern
times. In 2001 George W. Bush announced that the American government
will not fund research on human embryonic stem cells if scientists have to de¬
stroy new embryos to extract them (the policy permits research on stem-cell
lines that were previously extracted from embryos). He derived the policy
after consulting not just with scientists but with philosophers and religious
thinkers. Many of them framed the moral problem in terms of "ensoulment,"
the moment at which the cluster of cells that will grow into a child is en¬
dowed with a soul. Some argued that ensoulment occurs at conception,
which implies that the blastocyst (the five-day-old ball of cells from which
stem cells are taken) is morally equivalent to a person and that destroying it is
a form of murder." That argument proved decisive, which means that the

12/The Blank Slate, the Noble Savage, and the Ghost in the Machine

American policy on perhaps the most promising medical technology of the
twenty-first century was decided by pondering the moral issue as it might
have been framed centuries before: When does the ghost first enter the ma¬
chine?

These are just a few of the fingerprints of the Blank Slate, the Noble Sav¬
age, and the Ghost in the Machine on modern intellectual life. In the following
chapters we will see how the seemingly airy ideas of Enlightenment philoso¬
phers entrenched themselves in modern consciousness, and how recent dis¬
coveries are casting those ideas in doubt.

The Official Theory / 13

Chapter 2

Silly Putty

THE DANISH PHILOLOGIST Otto Jespersen (1860-1943) is one of history's
most beloved linguists. His vivid books are still read today, especially Growth
and Structure of the English Language, first published in 1905. Though lesper-
sen's scholarship is thoroughly modern, the opening pages remind us we are
not reading a contemporary book:

There is one expression that continually comes to my mind whenever I
think of the English language and compare it with others: it seems to be
positively and expressly masculine, it is the language of a grown-up man
and has very little childish or feminine about it. ...

To bring out one of these points I select at random, by way of con¬
trast, a passage from the language of Hawaii: «I kona hiki ana aku ilaila
ua hookipa ia mai la oia me ke aloha pumehana loa."Thus it goes on, no
single word ends in a consonant, and a group of two or more conso¬
nants is never found. Can anyone be in doubt that even if such a lan¬
guage sounds pleasantly and be full of music and harmony the total
impression is childlike and effeminate? You do not expect much vigor or
energy in a people speaking such a language; it seems adapted only to in¬
habitants of sunny regions where the soil requires scarcely any labour on
the part of man to yield him everything he wants, and where life there¬
fore does not bear the stamp of a hard struggle against nature and
fellow-creatures. In a lesser degree we find the same phonetic structure
in such languages as Italian and Spanish; but how different are our
Northern tongues.'

And so he continues, advertising the virility, sobriety, and logic of English-
and ends the chapter: «As the language is, so also is the nation:'

No modern reader can fail to be shocked by the sexism, racism, and chau¬
vinism of the discussion: the implication that women are childlike, the stereo-

14 I The Blank Slate, the Noble Savage, and the Ghost in the Machine

typing of a colonized people as indolent, the gratuitous exalting of the author's
own culture. Equally surprising are the sorry standards to which the great
scholar here has sunk. The suggestion that a language can be "grown-up" and
"masculine" is so subjective as to be meaningless. He attributes a personality
trait to an entire people without any evidence, then advances two theories-
that phonology reflects personality, and that warm climates breed laziness-
without invoking even correlational data, let alone proofof causation. Even on
his home ground the reasoning is flimsy. Languages with a consonant-vowel
syllable structure like Hawaiian call for longer words to convey the same
amount of information, hardly what you would expect in a people without
"vigor or energy:' And the consonant-encrusted syllables of English are liable
to be swallowed and misheard, hardly what you would expect from a logical,
businesslike people.

But perhaps most disturbing is Jespersen's obliviousness to the possibility
that he might be saying anything exceptionable. He took it for granted that his
biases would be shared by his readers, whom he knew to be fellow men and
speakers of "our" Northern tongues. "Can anyone be in doubt?" he asked
rhetorically; "you do not expect much vigor” from such a people, he asserted.
The inferiority of women and other races needed neither justification nor
apology.

I bring up Otto Jespersen, a man of his time, to show how standards have
changed. The passage is a random sample of intellectual life a century ago;
equally disturbing passages could have been taken from just about any writer
of the nineteenth or early twentieth century.' It was a time of white men tak¬
ing up the burden of leading their "new-caught sullen peoples, half-devil and
half-child"; of shores teeming with huddled masses and wretched refuse; of
European imperial powers looking (and sometimes throwing) daggers at one
another. Imperialism, immigration, nationalism, and the legacy of slavery
made differences between ethnic groups all too obvious. Some appeared edu¬
cated and cultured, others ignorant and backward; some used fists and clubs
to preserve their safety, others paid the police and the army to do it. It was
tempting to assume that northern Europeans were an advanced race suited to
rule the others. Just as convenient was the belief that women were constitu¬
tionally suited for the kitchen, church, and children, a belief supported by "re¬
search" showing that brainwork was bad for their physical and mental health.

Racial prejudice, too, had a scientific patina. Darwin's theory of evolution
was commonly misinterpreted as an explanation of intellectual and moral
progress rather than an explanation of how living things adapt to an ecologi¬
cal niche. The nonwhite races, it was easy to think, were rungs on an evolu¬
tionary ladder between the apes and the Europeans. Worse, Darwin's follower
Herbert Spencer wrote that do-gooders would only interfere with the progress
of evolution if they tried to improve the lot of the impoverished classes and

Silly Putty / 15

races, who were, in Spencer's view, biologically less fit. The doctrine of Social
Darwinism (or, as it ought to be called, Social Spencerisrn, for Darwin wanted
no part of it) attracted such unsurprising spokesmen as John D. Rockefeller
and Andrew Carnegie.' Darwin's cousin Francis Galton had suggested that
human evolution should be given a helping hand by discouraging the less fit
from breeding, a policy he called eugenics.' Within a few decades laws were
passed that called for the involuntary sterilization of delinquents and the "fee¬
bleminded" in Canada, the Scandinavian countries, thirty American states,
and, ominously, Germany. The Nazis' ideology of inferior races was later used
to justify the murder of millions of Jews, Gypsies, and homosexuals.

We have come a long way. Though attitudes far worse than Jespersen's
continue to thrive in much of the world and in parts of our society, they have
been driven out of mainstream intellectual life in Western democracies. Today
no respectable public figure in the United States, Britain, or Western Europe
can casually insult women or sling around invidious stereotypes of other races
or ethnic groups. Educated people try to be conscious of their hidden preju¬
dices and to measure them against the facts and against the sensibilities of oth¬
ers. In public life we try to judge people as individuals, not as specimens of a
sex or ethnic group. We try to distinguish might from right and our parochial
tastes from objective merit, and therefore respect cultures that are different or
poorer than ours. We realize that no mandarin is wise enough to be entrusted
with directing the evolution of the species, and that it is wrong in any case for
the government to interfere with such a personal decision as having a child.
The very idea that the members of an ethnic group should be persecuted be¬
cause of their biology fills us with revulsion.

These changes were cemented by the bitter lessons of lynchings, world
wars, forced sterilizations, and the Holocaust, which showcased the grave im¬
plications of denigrating an ethnic group. But they emerged earlier in the
twentieth century, the spinoff of an unplanned experiment: the massive im¬
migration, social mobility, and diffusion of knowledge of the modern era.
Most Victorian gentlemen could not have imagined that the coming century
would see a nation-state forged by Jewish pioneers and soldiers, a wave of
African American public intellectuals, or a software industry in Bangalore.
Nor could they have anticipated that women would lead nations in wars, run
huge corporations, or win Nobel Prizes in science. We now know that people
of both sexes and all races are capable of attaining any station in life.

This sea change included a revolution in the treatment of human nature
by scientists and scholars. Academics were swept along by the changing atti¬
tudes to race and sex, but they also helped to direct the tide by holding forth
on human nature in books and magazines and by lending their expertise to
government agencies. The prevailing theories of mind were refashioned to
make racism and sexism as untenable as possible. The doctrine of the Blank

16/The Blank Slate, the Noble Savage, and the Ghost in the Machine

Slate became entrenched in intellectual life in a form that has been called the
Standard Social Science Model or social constructionism." The model is now
second nature to people and few are aware of the history behind it. 6 Carl Deg-
ler, the foremost historian of this revolution, sums it up this way:

What the available evidence does seem to show is that ideology or a
philosophical belief that the world could be a freer and more just place
played a large part in the shift from biology to culture. Science, or at least
certain scientific principles or innovative scholarship also played a role'
in the transformation, but only a limited one. The main impetus came
from the will to establish a social order in which innate and immutable
forces of biology played no role in accounting for the behavior of social
groups."

The takeover of intellectual life by the Blank Slate followed different
paths in psychology and in the other social sciences, but they were propelled
by the same historical events and progressive ideology. By the second and
third decades of the twentieth century, stereotypes of women and ethnic
groups were starting to look silly. Waves of immigrants from southern and
eastern Europe, including many Jews, were filling the cities and climbing the
social ladder. African Americans had taken advantage of the new "Negro col¬
leges," had migrated northward, and had begun the Harlem Renaissance. The
graduates of flourishing women's colleges helped launch the first wave of
feminism. For the first time not all professors and students were white Anglo-
Saxon Protestant males. To say that this sliver of humanity was constitution¬
ally superior had not only become offensive but went against what people
could see with their own eyes. The social sciences in particular were attracting
women, Jews, Asians, and African Americans, some of whom became influen¬
tial thinkers.

Many of the pressing social problems of the first decades of the twentieth
century concerned the less fortunate members of these groups. Should more
immigrants be let in, and if so, from which countries? Once here, should they
be encouraged to assimilate, and if so, how? Should women be given equal po¬
litical rights and economic opportunities? Should blacks and whites be inte¬
grated? Other challenges were posed by children." Education had become
compulsory and a responsibility of the state. As the cities teemed and family
ties loosened, troubled and troublesome children became everyone's problem,
and new institutions were invented to deal with them, such as kindergartens,
orphanages, reform schools, fresh-air camps, humane societies, and boys' and
girls' clubs. Child development was suddenly on the front burner. These social
challenges were not going to go away, and the most humane assumption was
that all human beings had an equal potential to prosper if they were given the

Silly Putty / 17

right upbringing and opportunities. Many social scientists saw it as their job to
reinforce that assumption.

MODERN PSYCHOLOGICAL THEORY, as every introductory textbook makes
clear, has roots in John Locke and other Enlightenment thinkers. For Locke the
Blank Slate was a weapon against the church and tyrannical monarchs, but
these threats had subsided in the English-speaking world by the nineteenth
century. Locke’s intellectual heir John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) was perhaps the
first to apply his blank-slate psychology to political concerns we recognize
today. He was an early supporter of women's suffrage, compulsory education,
and the improvement of the conditions of the lower classes. This interacted
with his stands in psychology and philosophy, as he explained in his autobiog¬
raphy:

I have long felt that the prevailing tendency to regard all the marked dis¬
tinctions of human character as innate, and in the main indelible, and to
ignore the irresistible proofs that by far the greater part of those differ¬
ences, whether between individuals, races, or sexes, are such as not only
might but naturally would be produced by differences in circumstances,
is one of the chief hindrances to the rational treatment of great social
questions, and one of the greatest stumbling blocks to human improve¬
ment. ... [This tendency is] so agreeable to human indolence, as well as
to conservative interests generally, that unless attacked at the very root,
it is sure to be carried to even a greater length than is really justified by
the more moderate forms of intuitional philosophy."

By«intuitional philosophy" Mill was referring to Continental intellectuals
who maintained (among other things) that the categories of reason were in¬
nate. Mill wanted to attack their theory of psychology at the root to combat
what he thought were its conservative social implications. He refined a theory
of learning called associationism (previously formulated by Locke) that tried
to explain human intelligence without granting it any innate organization. Ac¬
cording to this theory, the blank slate is inscribed with sensations, which Locke
called «ideas" and modern psychologists call «features." Ideas that repeatedly
appear in succession (such as the redness, roundness, and sweetness of an
apple) become associated, so that anyone of them can call to mind the others.
And similar objects in the world activate overlapping sets ofideas in the mind.
For example, after many dogs present themselves to the senses, the features
that they share (fur, barking, four legs, and so on) hang together to stand for
the category «dog."

The associationism of Locke and Mill has been recognizable in psychol-

18/The Blank Slate, the Noble Savage, and the Ghost in the Machine

ogy ever since. It became the core of most models oflearning, especially in the
approach called behaviorism, which dominated psychology from the 1920s to
the 1960s. The founder of behaviorism, John B. Watson (1878-1958), wrote
one of the century's most famous pronouncements of the Blank Slate:

Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified
world to bring them up in and I'll guarantee to take anyone at random
and train him to become any type of specialist I might select-doctor,
lawyer, artist, merchant-chief, and yes, even beggar-man and thief, re¬
gardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and
race of his ancestors. 10

In behaviorism" an infant's talents and abilities didn't matter because
there was no such thing as a talent or an ability. Watson had banned them from
psychology, together with other contents of the mind, such as ideas, beliefs,
desires, and feelings. They were subjective and unmeasurable, he said, and
unfit for science, which studies only objective and measurable things. To a be-
haviorist, the only legitimate topic for psychology is overt behavior and how it
is controlled by the present and past environment. (There is an old joke in psy¬
chology: What does a behaviorist say after making love?" It was good for you;
how was it for me?")

Locke’s "ideas" had been replaced by "stimuli" and "responses," but his
laws of association survived as laws of conditioning. A response can be associ¬
ated with a new stimulus, as when Watson presented a baby with a white rat
and then clanged a hammer against an iron bar, allegedly making the baby as¬
sociate fear with fur. And a response could be associated with a reward, as
when a cat in a box eventually learned that pulling a string opened a door and
allowed it to escape. In these cases an experimenter set up a contingency be¬
tween a stimulus and another stimulus or between a response and a reward. In
a natural environment, said the behaviorists, these contingencies are part of
the causal texture of the world, and they inexorably shape the behavior of or¬
ganisms, including humans.

Among the casualties of behaviorist minimalism was the rich psychology
of William James (1842-1910). James had been inspired by Darwin's argu¬
ment that perception, cognition, and emotion, like physical organs, had
evolved as biological adaptations. James invoked the notion of instinct to ex¬
plain the preferences of humans, not just those of animals, and he posited nu¬
merous mechanisms in his theory of mental life, including short-term and
long-term memory. But with the advent of behaviorism they all joined the
index of forbidden concepts. The psychologist J. R. Kantor wrote in 1923:
"Brief is the answer to the question as to what is the relationship between

Silly Putty / 19

social psychology and instincts. Plainly, there is no relationship,"!' Even sexual
desire was redefined as a conditioned response. The psychologist Zing Yang
Kuo wrote in 1929:

Behavior is not a manifestation of hereditary factors, nor can it be ex¬
pressed in terms of heredity. [It is] a passive and forced movement me¬
chanically and solely determined by the structural pattern of the
organism and the nature of environmental forces_All our sexual ap¬

petites are the result of social stimulation. The organism possesses no
ready-made reaction to the other sex, any more than it possesses innate
ideas."

Behaviorists believed that behavior could be understood independently of
the rest of biology, without attention to the genetic makeup of the animal or
the evolutionary history of the species. Psychology came to consist of the study
oflearning in laboratory animals. B.F. Skinner (1904-1990), the most famous
psychologist in the middle decades of the twentieth century, wrote a book
called The Behavior of Organisms in which the only organisms were rats and
pigeons and the only behavior was lever pressing and key pecking. It took a
trip to the circus to remind psychologists that species and their'instincts mat¬
tered after all. In an article called "The Misbehavior of Organisms;' Skinner's
students Keller and Marian Breland reported that when they tried to use his
techniques to train animals to insert poker chips into vending machines, the
chickens pecked the chips, the raccoons washed them, and the pigs tried to
root them with their snouts. 13 And behaviorists were as hostile to the brain as
they were to genetics. As late as 1974, Skinner wrote that studying the brain
was just another misguided quest to find the causes ofbehavior inside the or¬
ganism rather than out in the world. 14

Behaviorism not only took over psychology but infiltrated the public con¬
sciousness. Watson wrote an influential childrearing manual recommending
that parents establish rigid feeding schedules for their children and give them
a minimum of attention and love. Ifyou comfort a crying child, he wrote, you
will reward him for crying and thereby increase the frequency of crying behav¬
ior. (Benjamin Speck's Baby and Child Care, first published in 1946 and fa¬
mous for recommending indulgence toward children, was in part a reaction to
Watson.) Skinner wrote several bestsellers arguing that harmful behavior is
neither instinctive nor freely chosen but inadvertently conditioned. If we
turned society into a big Skinner box and controlled behavior deliberately
rather’ than haphazardly, we could eliminate aggression, overpopulation,
crowding, pollution, and inequality, and thereby attain utopia." The noble
savage became the noble pigeon.

20/The Blank Slate, the Noble Savage, and the Ghost in the Machine

Strict behaviorism is pretty much dead in psychology, but many of its at¬
titudes live on. Associationism is the learning theory assumed by many math¬
ematical models and neural network simulations of learning." Many
neuroscientists equate learning with the forming of associations, and look for
an associative bond in the physiology of neurons and synapses, ignoring other
kinds of computation that might implement learning in the brain." (For ex¬
ample, storing the value of a variable in the brain, as in "x = 3:' is a critical
computational step in navigating and foraging, which are highly developed
talents of animals in the wild. But this kind of learning cannot be reduced to
the formation of associations, and so it has been ignored in neuroscience.)
Psychologists and neuroscientists still treat organisms interchangeably, sel¬
dom asking whether a convenient laboratory animal (a rat, a cat, a monkey) is
like or unlike humans in crucial ways.is Until recently, psychology ignored the
content of beliefs and emotions and the possibility that the mind had evolved
to treat biologically important categories in different ways." Theories of
memory and reasoning didn't distinguish thoughts about people from
thoughts about rocks or houses. Theories of emotion didn't distinguish fear
from anger, jealousy, or love." Theories of social relations didn't distinguish
among family, friends, enemies, and strangers." Indeed, the topics in psychol¬
ogy that most interest laypeople-Iove, hate, work, play, food, sex, status,
dominance, jealousy, friendship, religion, art-are almost completely absent
from psychology textbooks.

One of the major documents of late twentieth-century psychology was
the two-volume Parallel Distributed Processing by David Rumelhart, James
McClelland, and their collaborators, which presented a style of neural network
modeling called connectionism.P Rumelhart and McClelland argued that
generic associationist networks, subjected to massive amounts of training,
could explain all of cognition. They realized that this theory left them without
a good answer to the question "Why are people smarter than rats?" Here is
their answer:

Given all of the above, the question does seem a bit puzzling.... People
have much more cortex than rats do or even than other primates do; in
particular they have very much more ... brain structure not dedicated
to input/output-and presumably, this extra cortex is strategically
placed in the brain to subserve just those functions that differentiate
people from rats or even apes....

But there must be another aspect to the difference between rats and
people as well. This is that the human environment includes other peo¬
ple and the cultural devices that they have developed to organize their
thinking processes."

Silly Putty/21

Humans, then, are just rats with bigger blank slates, plus something called
"cultural devices:' And that brings us to the other half of the twentieth-
century revolution in social science.

He's so unhip, when you say "Dylan;'

He thinks you're talkin' about Dylan Thomas (whoever he was).

The man ain't got no culture.

-Simon and Garfunkel

The word culture used to refer to exalted genres of entertainment, such as
poetry, opera, and ballet. The other familiar sense-"the totality of socially
transmitted behavior patterns, arts, beliefs, institutions, and all other products
of human work and thought"-is only a century old. This change in the En¬
glish language is just one of the legacies of the father of modern anthropology,
Franz Boas (1858-1942).

The ideas of Boas, like the ideas of the major thinkers in psychology, were
rooted in the empiricist philosophers of the Enlightenment, in this case
George Berkeley (1685-1753). Berkeley formulated the theory of idealism, the
notion that ideas, not bodies and other hunks of matter, are the ultimate con¬
stituents of reality. After twists and turns that are too convoluted to recount
here, idealism became influential among nineteenth-century German
thinkers. It was embraced by the young Boas, a German Jew from a secular, lib¬
eral family.

Idealism allowed Boas to lay a new intellectual foundation for egalitarian¬
ism. The differences among human races and ethnic groups, he proposed,
come not from their physical constitution but from their culture, a system of
ideas and values spread by language and other forms of social behavior. Peo¬
ples differ because their cultures differ. Indeed, that is how we should refer to
them: the Eskimo culture or the Jewish culture, not the Eskimo race or the
Jewish race. The idea that minds are shaped by culture served as a bulwark
against racism and was the theory one ought to prefer on moral grounds. Boas
wrote, “I claim that, unless the contrary can be proved, we must assume that all
complex activities are socially determined, not hereditary,"?"

Boas's case was not just a moral injunction; it was rooted in real discover¬
ies. Boas studied native peoples, immigrants, and children in orphanages to
prove that all groups ofhumans had equal potential. Turning Jespersen on his
head. Boas showed that the languages of primitive peoples were not simpler
than those of Europeans; they were just different. Eskimos' difficulty in dis¬
criminating the sounds of our language, for example, is matched by our diffi¬
culty in discriminating the sounds of theirs. True, many non-Western
languages lack the means to express certain abstract concepts. They may have
no words for numbers higher than three, for example, or no word for good-

22/The Blank Slate, the Noble Savage, and the Ghost in the Machine

ness in general as opposed to the goodness of a particular person. But those
limitations simply reflect the daily needs of those people as they live their lives,
not an infirmity in their mental abilities. As in the story of Socrates drawing
abstract philosophical concepts out of a slave boy. Boas showed that he could
elicit new word forms for abstract concepts like "goodness" and "pity" out of a
Kwakiutl native from the Pacific Northwest. He also observed that when native
peoples come into contact with civilization and acquire things that have to be
counted, they quickly adopt a full-blown counting system.P

For all his emphasis on culture. Boas was not a relativist who believed that
all cultures are equivalent, nor was he an empiricist who believed in the Blank
Slate. He considered European civilization superior to tribal cultures, insisting
only that all peoples were capable of achieving it. He did not deny that there
might be a universal human nature, or that there might be differences among'
people within an ethnic group. What mattered to him was the idea that all eth¬
nic groups are endowed with the same basic mental abilities." Boas was right
about this, and today it is accepted by virtually all scholars and scientists.

But Boas had created a monster. His students came to dominate American
social science, and each generation outdid the previous one in its sweeping
pronouncements. Boas's students insisted not just that differences among eth¬
nic groups must be explained in terms of culture but that every aspect of
human existence must be explained in terms of culture. For example. Boas had
favored social explanations unless they were disproven, but his student Albert
Kroeber favored them regardless of the evidence. "Heredity: 1 he wrote, "cannot
be allowed to have acted any part in history."27 Instead, the chain of events
shaping a people "involves the absolute conditioning of historical events by
other historical events."?"

Kroeber did not just deny that social behavior could be explained by in¬
nate properties of minds. He denied that it could be explained by any proper¬
ties of minds. A culture, he wrote, is superorganic-it floats in its own universe,
free of the flesh and blood of actual men and women: "Civilization is not men¬
tal action but a body or stream of products of mental exercise.... Mentality
relates to the individual. The social or cultural, on the other hand, is in its
essence non-individual. Civilization as such begins only where the individual
ends,"?"

These two ideas-the denial of human nature, and the autonomy of
culture from individual minds-were also articulated by the founder of soci¬
ology, Emile Durkheim (1858-1917), who had foreshadowed Kroeber's doc¬
trine of the superorganic mind:

Every time that a social phenomenon is directly explained by a psycho¬
logical phenomenon, we may be sure that the explanation is false....

The group thinks, feels, and acts quite differently from the way in which

Silly Putty / 23

members would were they isolated.... If we begin with the individual
in seeking to explain phenomena, we shall be able to understand noth¬
ing of what takes place in the group.... Individual natures are merely
the indeterminate material that the social factor molds and transforms.
Their contribution consists exclusively in very general attitudes, in
vague and consequently plastic predispositions."

And he laid down a law for the social sciences that would be cited often in the
century to come: “The determining cause of a social fact should be sought
among the social facts preceding it and not among the states of individual con-
sciousness."31

Both psychology and the other social sciences, then, denied that the
minds of individual people were important, but they set out in different di¬
rections from there. Psychology banished mental entities like beliefs and de¬
sires altogether and replaced them with stimuli and responses. The other
social sciences located beliefs and desires in cultures and societies rather than
in the heads of individual people. The different social sciences also agreed
that the contents of cognition-ideas, thoughts, plans, and so on-were re¬
ally phenomena of language, overt behavior that anyone could hear and write
down. (Watson proposed that "thinking" really consisted of teensy move¬
ments of the mouth and throat.) But most of all they shared a dislike of in¬
stincts and evolution. Prominent social scientists repeatedly declared the slate
to be blank:

Instincts do not create customs; customs create instincts, for the puta¬
tive instincts of human beings are always learned and never native.

-Ellsworth Faris (1927)32

Cultural phenomena ... are in no respect hereditary but are character¬
istically and without exception acquired.

-George Murdock (1932) 33

Man has no nature; what he has is history.

—Jose Ortega y Gasset (193 5) 34

With the exception of the instinctoid reactions in infants to sudden
withdrawals of support and to sudden loud noises, the human being is
entirely instinctless_Man is man because he has no instincts, be¬

cause everything he is and has become he has learned, acquired, from
his culture, from the man-made part of the environment, from other
human beings.

-Ashley Montagu (1973)35

24/The Blank Slate, the Noble Savage, and the Ghost in the Machine

True, the metaphor of choice was no longer a scraped tablet or white
paper. Durkheim had spoken of "indeterminate material:' some kind of blob
that was molded or pounded into shape by culture. Perhaps the best modern
metaphor is Silly Putty, the rubbery stuff that children use both to copy
printed matter (like a blank slate) and to mold into desired shapes (like inde¬
terminate material). The malleability metaphor resurfaced in statements by
two of Boas's most famous students:

Most people are shaped to the form of their culture because of the mal¬
leability of their original endowment.... The great mass of individuals
take quite readily the form that is presented to them.

-Ruth Benedict (1934) 36

We are forced to conclude that human nature is almost unbelievably
malleable, responding accurately and contrastingly to contrasting cul¬
tural conditions.

-Margaret Mead (1935)37

Others likened the mind to some kind of sieve:

Much of what is commonly called “human nature" is merely culture
thrown against a screen of nerves, glands, sense organs, muscles, etc.

-Leslie White (1949)38

Or to the raw materials for a factory:

Human nature is the rawest, most undifferentiated of raw material.

-Margaret Mead (1928)39

Our ideas, our values, our acts, even our emotions, are, like our nervous
system itself, cultural products-products manufactured, indeed, out of
tendencies, capacities, and dispositions with which we were born, but
manufactured nonetheless.

-Clifford Geertz (1973)40

Or to an unprogrammed computer:

Man is the animal most desperately dependent upon such extragenetic,
outside-the-skin control mechanisms, such cultural programs, for or¬
dering his behavior.

-Clifford Geertz (1973)41

Silly Putty / 25

Or to some other amorphous entity that can have many things done to it:

Cultural psychology is the study of the way cultural traditions and social
practices regulate, express, transform, and permute the human psyche,
resulting less in psychic unity for humankind than in ethnic divergences
in mind, self and emotion.

-Richard Shweder (1990)42

The superorganic or group mind also became an article of faith in social
science. Robert Lowie (another Boas student) wrote, "The principles of psy¬
chology are as incapable of accounting for the phenomena of culture as is
gravitation to account for architectural styles.?" And in case you missed its full
implications, the anthropologist Leslie White spelled it out:

Instead of regarding the individual as a First Cause, as a prime mover, as
the initiator and determinant of the culture process, we now see him as
a component part, and a tiny and relatively insignificant part at that, of
a vast, socio-cultural system that embraces innumerable individuals at
anyone time and extends back into their remote past as well. ... For
purposes of scientific interpretation, the culture process may be re¬
garded as a thing suigeneris; culture is explainable in terms of culture."

In other words, we should forget about the mind of an individual person like
you, that tiny and insignificant part of a vast sociocultural system. The mind
that counts is the one belonging to the group, which is capable of thinking,
feeling, and acting on its own.

The doctrine of the superorganism has had an impact on modern life that
extends well beyond the writings of social scientists. It underlies the tendency
to reify"society" as a moral agent that can be blamed for sins as if it were a per¬
son. It drives identity politics, in which civil rights and political perquisites are
allocated to groups rather than to individuals. And as we shall see in later
chapters, it defined some of the great divides between major political systems
in the twentieth century.

THE BLANK SLATE was not the only part of the official theory that social sci¬
entists felt compelled to prop up. They also strove to consecrate the Noble Sav¬
age. Mead painted a Gauguinesque portrait of native peoples as peaceable,
egalitarian, materially satisfied, and sexually unconflicted. Her uplifting vision
of who we used to be-and therefore who we can become again-was ac¬
cepted by such otherwise skeptical writers as Bertrand Russell and H. L.
Mencken. Ashley Montagu (also from the Boas circle), a prominent public in¬
tellectual from the 1950s until his recent death, tirelessly invoked the doctrine

26/The Blank Slate, the Noble Savage, and the Ghost in the Machine

of the Noble Savage to justify the quest for brotherhood and peace and to re¬
fute anyone who might think such efforts were futile. In 1950, for example, he
drafted a manifesto for the newly formed UNESCO that declared, «Biological
studies lend support to the ethic of universal brotherhood, for man is born
with drives toward co-operation, and unless these drives are satisfied, men and
nations alike fall ill.))45 With the ashes of thirty-five million victims of World
War II still warm or radioactive, a reasonable person might wonder how "bio¬
logical studies" could show anything of the kind. The draft was rejected, but
Montagu had better luck in the decades to come, when UNESCO and many
scholarly societies adopted similar resolutions."

More generally, social scientists saw the malleability of humans and the
autonomy of culture as doctrines that might bring about the age-old dream of
perfecting mankind. We are not stuck with what we don’t like about our cur¬
rent predicament, they argued. Nothing prevents us from changing it except a
lack ofwill and the benighted beliefthat we are permanently consigned to it by
biology. Many social scientists have expressed the hope of a new and improved
human nature:

I felt (and said so early) that the environmental explanation was prefer¬
able, whenever justified by the data, because it was more optimistic,
holding out the hope of improvement.

-Otto Klineberg (1928)47

Modern sociology and modern anthropology are one in saying that the
substance of culture, or civilization, is social tradition and that this so¬
cial tradition is indefinitely modifiable by further learning on the part of
men for happier and better ways of living together_Thus the scien¬

tific study of institutions awakens faith in the possibility of remaking
both human nature and human social life.

-Charles Ellwood (1922)48

Barriers in many fields of knowledge are falling below the new optimism
which is that anybody can learn anything.... We have turned away
from the concept of human ability as something fixed in the physiolog¬
ical structure, to that of a flexible and versatile mechanism subject to
great improvement.

-Robert Faris (1961)49

Though psychology is not as politicized as some of the other social sci¬
ences, it too is sometimes driven by a utopian vision in which changes in child-
rearing and education will ameliorate social pathologies and improve human
welfare. And psychological theorists sometimes try to add moral heft to argu¬
ments for connectionism or other empiricist theories with warnings about the

Silly Putty/27

pessimistic implications of innatist theories. They argue, for example, that in-
natist theories open the door to inborn differences, which could foster racism,
or that the theories imply that human traits are unchangeable, which could
weaken support for social programs.50

TWENTIETH-CENTURY SOCIAL SCIENCE embraced not just the Blank Slate
and the Noble Savage but the third member of the trinity, the Ghost in the Ma¬
chine. The declaration that we can change what we don't like about ourselves
became a watchword of social science. But that only raises the question "Who
or whatisthe'we?” If the “we” doing the remaking arejustother hunks ofmat-
ter in the biological world, then any malleability of behavior we discover would
be cold comfort, because we, the molders, would be biologically constrained
and therefore might not mold people, or allow ourselves to be molded, in the
most socially salutary way. A ghost in the machine is the ultimate liberator of
human will-including the will to change society-from mechanical causa¬
tion. The anthropologist Loren Eiseley made this clear when he wrote:

The mind of man, by indetermination, by the power of choice and cul¬
tural communication, is on the verge of escape from the blind control of
that deterministic world with which the Darwinists had unconsciously
shackled man. The inborn characteristics laid upon him by the biologi¬
cal extremists have crumbled away.... Wallace saw and saw correctly,
that with the rise of man the evolution of parts was to a marked degree
outmoded, that mind was now the arbiter ofhuman destiny."

The "Wallace" that Eiseley is referring to is Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913),
the co-discoverer with Darwin of natural selection. Wallace parted company
from Darwin by claiming that the human mind could not be explained by evo¬
lution and must have been designed by a superior intelligence. He certainly
did believe that the mind of man could escape "the blind control of a deter¬
ministic world." Wallace became a spiritualist and spent the later years of his
career searching for away to communicate with the souls of the dead.

The social scientists who believed in an absolute separation of culture
from biology may not have literally believed in a spook haunting the brain.
Some used the analogy of the difference between living and nonliving matter.
Kroeber wrote: "The dawn of the social is not a link in any chain, not a step
in a path, but a leap to another plane [It is like] the first occurrence of life

in the hitherto lifeless universe.... From this moment on there should be two
worlds in place of one.»52 And Lowie insisted that it was "not mysticism, but
sound scientific method" to say that culture was "suigeneris" and could be ex¬
plained only by culture, because everyone knows that in biology a living cell
can come only from another living cell.53

28/The Blank Slate, the Noble Savage, and the Ghost in the Machine

At the time that Kroeber and Lowie wrote, they had biology on their side.
Many biologists still thought that living things were animated by a special
essence, an elan vital, and could not be reduced to inanimate matter. A 1931
history of biology, referring to genetics as it was then understood, said, "Thus
the last of the biological theories leaves us where we first started, in the pres¬
ence of a power called life or psyche which is not only of its own kind but
unique in each and all of its exhibitions. "54 In the next chapter we will see that
the analogy between the autonomy of culture and the autonomy of life would
prove to be more telling than these social scientists realized.

Silly Putty / 29

Chapter 3

The Last Wall to Fall

IN 1755 Samuel JOHNSON wrote that his dictionary should not be expected
to "change sublunary nature, and clear the world at once from folly, vanity, and
affectation." Few people today are familiar with the lovely word sublunary, lit¬
erally "below the moon." It alludes to the ancient belief in a strict division be¬
tween the pristine, lawful, unchanging cosmos above and our grubby, chaotic,
fickle Earth below. The division was already obsolete when Johnson used the
word: Newton had shown that the same force that pulled an apple toward the
ground kept the moon in its celestial orbit.

/ Newton's theory that a single set of laws governed the motions of all ob-
.. jects in the universe was the first event in one of the great developments in
/ human understanding: the unification of knowledge, which the biologist E. O.
Wilson has termed consilience.' Newton's breaching of the wall between the
terrestrial and the celestial was followed by a collapse of the once equally firm
(and now equally forgotten) wall between the creative past and the static pres-
j ent. That happened when Charles Lyell showed that the Earth was sculpted in
If the past by forces we see today (such as earthquakes and erosion) acting over
Limmense spans of time.

The living and nonliving, too, no longer occupy different realms. In 1628
William Harvey showed that the human body is a machine that runs by hy¬
draulics and other mechanical principles. In 1828 Friedrich Wohler showed
\ that the stuff of life is not a magical, pulsating gel but ordinary compounds
^ following the laws of chemistry. Charles Darwin showed how the astonishing
diversity of life and its ubiquitous signs of design could arise from the physical
process of natural selection among replicators. Gregor Mendel, and then
James Watson and Francis Crick, showed how replication itself could be un¬
derstood in physical terms.

The unification of our understanding of life with our understanding of
matter and. energy was the greatest scientific achievement of the second half of
the twentieth century. One of its many consequences was to pull the rug out

30 /The Blank Slate, the Noble Savage, and the Ghost in the Machine

from under social scientists like Kroeber and Lowie who had invoked the
"sound scientific method" of placing the living and nonliving in parallel uni¬
verses.Wenow know thatcellsdid not alwayscome from other cells and that the
emergence of life did not create a second world where before there was just one.
Cells evolved from simpler replicating molecules, a nonliving part of the physi¬
cal world, and may be understood as collections of molecular machinery-fan -
tastically complicated machinery, of course, but machinery nonetheless.

This leaves one wall standing in the landscape of knowledge, the one that
twentieth-century social scientists guarded so jealously. It divides matter from
mind, the material from the spiritual, the physical from the mental, biology
from culture, nature from society, and the sciences from the social sciences, hu¬
manities, and arts. The division was built into each of the doctrines of the offi¬
cial theory: the blank slate given by biology versus the contents inscribed by
experience and culture, the nobility of the savage in the state of nature versus
the corruption of social institutions, the machine following inescapable laws
versus the ghost that is free to choose and to improve the human condition.

But this wall, too, is falling. New ideas from four frontiers ofknowledge-
the sciences of mind, brain, genes, and evolution-are breaching the wall with
a new understanding of human nature. In this chapter I will show how they are
filling in the blank slate, declassing the noble savage, and exorcising the ghost
in the machine. In the following chapter I will show that this new conception
of human nature, connected to biology from below, can in turn be connected
to the humanities and social sciences above. That new conception can give the
phenomena of culture their due without segregating them into a parallel uni¬
verse. 1

THE FIRST BRIDGE between biology and culture is the science of mind, cog¬
nitive science.' The concept of mind has been perplexing for as long as people
have reflected on their thoughts and feelings. The very idea has spawned
paradoxes, superstitions, and bizarre theories in every period and culture.
One can almost sympathize with the behaviorists and social constructionists
of the first half of the twentieth century, who looked on minds as enigmas or
conceptual traps that were best avoided in favor of overt behavior or the traits
of a culture.

But beginning in the 7950s with the cognitive revolution, all that changed.
It is now possible to make sense of mental processes and even to study them in
the lab. And with a firmer grasp on the concept of mind, we can see that many
tenets of the Blank Slate that once seemed appealing are now unnecessary or
even incoherent. Here are five ideas from the cognitive revolution that have re¬
vamped how we think and talk about minds.

The first idea: The mental world can be grounded in the physical world by
the concepts of information, computation, andfeedback. A great divide between

The Last Wall to Fall/31

mind and matter has always seemed natural because behavior appears to have
a different kind of trigger than other physical events. Ordinary events have
causes, it seems, but human behavior has reasons. I once participated in a BBC
television debate on whether «sciencecan explain human behavior." Arguing
against the resolution was a philosopher who asked how we might explain why
someone was put in jail. Sayit was for inciting racial hatred. The intention, the
hatred, and even the prison, she said, cannot be described in the language of
physics. There is simply no way to define “hatred” or “jail” in terms of the
movements of particles. Explanations of behavior are like narratives, she ar¬
gued, couched in the intentions of actors-a plane completely separate from
natural science. Or take a simpler example. How might we explain why Rex
just walked over to the phone? We would not say that phone-shaped stimuli
caused Rex's limbs to swing in certain arcs. Rather, we might say that he
wanted to speak to his friend Cecile and knew that Cecile was home. No ex¬
planation has as much predictive power as that one. If Rex was no longer on
speaking terms with Cecile, or if he remembered that Cecile was out bowling
that night, his body would not have risen off the couch.

For millennia the gap between physical events, on the one hand, and
meaning, content, ideas, reasons, and intentions, on the other, seemed to
cleave the universe in two. How can something as ethereal as«inciting hatred"
or «wanting to speak to Cecile" actually cause matter to move in space? But the
cognitive revolution unified the world of ideas with the world of matter using
a powerful new theory: that mental life can be explained in terms of informa¬
tion, computation, and feedback. Beliefs and memories are collections of in-
formation-like facts in a database, but residing in patterns of activity and
structure in the brain. Thinking and planning are systematic transformations
of these patterns, like the operation of a computer program. Wanting and try¬
ing are feedback loops, like the principle behind a thermostat: they receive in¬
formation about the discrepancy between a goal and the current state of the
world, and then they execute operations that tend to reduce the difference. The
mind is connected to the world by the sense organs, which transduce physical
energy into data structures in the brain, and by motor programs, by which the
brain controls the muscles.

This general idea may be called the computational theory of mind. It is
not the same as the "computer metaphor" of the mind, the suggestion that the
mind literally works like a human-made database, computer program, or ther¬
mostat. It says only that we can explain minds and human-made information
processors using some ofthe same principles. Itisjust like other cases in which
the natural world and human engineering overlap. A physiologist might in¬
voke the same laws of optics to explain how the eye works and how a camera
works without implying that the eye is like a camera in every detail.

The computational theory of mind does more than explain the existence

32/The Blank Slate, the Noble Savage, and the Ghost in the Machine

of knowing, thinking, and trying without invoking a ghost in the machine
(though that would be enough of a feat). It also explains how those processes
can be intelligent-how rationality can emerge from a mindless physical
process. If a sequence of transformations of information stored in a hunk of
matter (such as brain tissue or silicon) mirrors a sequence of deductions that
obey the laws of logic, probability, or cause and effect in the world, they will
generate correct predictions about the world. And making correct predictions
in pursuit of a goal is a pretty good definition of"intelligence."3

Of course there is no new thing under the sun, and the computational the¬
ory of mind was foreshadowed by Hobbes when he described mental activity
as tiny motions and wrote that "reasoning is but reckoning." Three and a half
centuries later, science has caught up to his vision. Perception, memory, im¬
agery, reasoning, decision making, language, and motor control are being stud¬
ied in the lab and successfully modeled as computational paraphernalia such
as rules, strings, matrices, pointers, lists, files,trees, arrays, loops, propositions,
and networks. For example, cognitive psychologists are studying the graphics
system in the head and thereby explaining how people "see" the solution to a
problem in a mental image. They are studying the web of concepts in long¬
term memory and explaining why some facts are easier to recall than others.
They are studying the processor and memory used by the language system to
learn why some sentences are a pleasure to read and others a difficult slog.

And if the proof is in the computing, then the sister field of artificial intel¬
ligence is confirming that ordinary matter can perform feats that were sup¬
posedly performable by mental stuff alone. In the 1950s computers were
already being called "electronic brains" because they could calculate sums, or¬
ganize data, and prove theorems. Soon they could correct spelling, set type,
solve equations, and simulate experts on restricted topics such as picking
stocks and diagnosing diseases. For decades we psychologists preserved
human bragging rights by telling our classes that no computer could read text,
decipher speech, or recognize faces, but these boasts are obsolete. Today soft¬
ware that can recognize printed letters and spoken words comes packaged
with home computers. Rudimentary programs that understand or translate
sentences are available in many search engines and Help programs, and they
are steadily improving. Face-recognition systems have advanced to the point
that civil libertarians are concerned about possible abuse when they are used
with security cameras in public places.

Human chauvinists can still write off these low-level feats. Sure, they say,
the input and output processing can be fobbed off onto computational mod¬
ules, but you still need a human user with the capacity for judgment, reflec¬
tion, and creativity. But according to the computational theory of mind, these
capacities are themselves forms of information processing and can be imple¬
mented in a computational system. In 1997 an IBM computer called Deep

The Last Wall to Fall / 33

Blue defeated the world chess champion Garry Kasparov, and unlike its pre¬
decessors, it did not just evaluate trillions of moves by brute force but was
fitted with strategies that intelligently responded to patterns in the game.
Newsweek called the match "The Brain's Last Stand." Kasparov called the out¬
come "the end of mankind."

You might still object that chess is an artificial world with discrete moves
and a clear winner, perfectly suited to the rule-crunching of a computer. Peo¬
ple, on the other hand, live in a messy world offering unlimited moves and
nebulous goals. Surely this requires human creativity and intuition-which is
why everyone knows that computers will never compose a symphony, write a
story, or paint a picture. But everyone may be wrong. Recent artificial intelli¬
gence systems have written credible short stories," composed convincing
Mozart-like symphonies," drawn appealing pictures of people and land¬
scapes," and conceived clever ideas for advertisements."

None of this is to say that the brain works like a digital computer, that ar¬
tificial intelligence will ever duplicate the human mind, or that computers are
conscious in the sense ofhaving first-person subjective experience. But it does
suggest that reasoning, intelligence, imagination, and creativity are forms of
information processing, a well-understood physical process. Cognitive sci¬
ence, with the help ofthe computational theory ofmind, has exorcised at least
one ghost from the machine.

A second idea: The mind cannot be a blank slate, because blank slates don't
do anything. As long as people had only the haziest concept of what a mind was
or how it might work, the metaphor of a blank slate inscribed by the environ¬
ment did not seem too outrageous. But as soon as one starts to think seriously
about what kind of computation enables a system to see, think, speak, and
plan, the problem with blank slates becomes all too obvious: they don't do
anything. The inscriptions will sit there forever unless something notices pat¬
terns in them, combines them with patterns learned at other times, uses the
combinations to scribble new thoughts onto the slate, and reads the results to
guide behavior toward goals. Locke recognized this problem and alluded to
something called "the understanding," which looked at the inscriptions on the
white paper and carried out the recognizing, reflecting, and associating. But of
course explaining how the mind understands by invoking something called
"the understanding" is circular.

This argument against the Blank Slate was stated pithily by Gottfried Wil¬
helm Leibniz (1646-1716) in a reply to Locke. Leibniz repeated the empiricist
motto "There is nothing in the intellect that was not first in the senses;' then
added, "except the intellect itself." Something in the mind must be innate, if it
is only the mechanisms that do the learning. Something has to see a world of
objects rather than a kaleidoscope of shimmering pixels. Something has to
infer the content of a sentence rather than parrot back the exact wording.

34/The Blank Slate, the Noble Savage, and the Ghost in the Machine

Something has to interpret other people's behavior as their attempts to achieve
goals rather than as trajectories of jerking arms and legs.

In the spirit of Locke, one could attribute these feats to an abstract
noun-perhaps not to “the understanding" but to «learning," intelligence,"
«plasticity;' or "adaptiveness,” But as Leibniz remarked, to do so is to cc[save ap¬
pearances] by fabricating faculties or occult qualities, ... and fancying them
to be like little demons or imps which can without ado perform whatever is
wanted, as though pocket watches told the time by a certain horological fac¬
ulty without needing wheels, or as though mills crushed grain by a fractive fac¬
ulty without needing anything in the way of millstones,"? Leibniz, like Hobbes
(who had influenced him), was ahead of his time in recognizing that intelli¬
gence is a form of information processing and needs complex machinery to
carry it out. As we now know, computers don't understand speech or recognize
text as they roll off the assembly line; someone has to install the right software
first. The same is likely to be true of the far more demanding performance of
the human being. Cognitive modelers have found that mundane challenges
like walking around furniture, understanding a sentence, recalling a fact, or
guessing someone's intentions are formidable engineering problems that are
at or beyond the frontiers of artificial intelligence. The suggestion that they
can be solved by a lump of Silly Putty that is passively molded by something
called «culture" just doesn't cut the mustard.

This is not to say that cognitive scientists have put the nature-nurture de¬
bate completely behind them; they are still spread out along a continuum of
opinion on how much standard equipment comes with the human mind. At
one end are the philosopher Jerry Fodor, who has suggested that all concepts
might be innate (even «doorknob" and «tweezers"), and the linguist Noam
Chomsky, who believes that the word «learning" is misleading and we should
say that children «grow" language instead." At the other end are the connec-
tionists, including Rumelhart, McClelland, JeffreyElman, and Elizabeth Bates,
who build relatively simple computer models and train the living daylights out
ofthem.ii Fans locate the first extreme, which originated at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, at the East Pole, the mythical place from which all di¬
rections are west. They locate the second extreme, which originated at the Uni¬
versity of California, San Diego, at the West Pole, the mythical place from
which all directions are east. (The names were suggested by Fodor during an
MIT seminar at which he was fulminating against a«WestCoast theorist" and
someone pointed out that the theorist worked at Yale, which is, technically, on
the East Coast.) 12

But here is why the East Pole-West Pole debate is different from the ones
that preoccupied philosophers for millennia: neither side believes in the Blank
Slate. Everyone acknowledges that there can be no learning without innate cir¬
cuitry to do the learning. In their West Pole manifesto Rethinking Innateness,

The Last Wall to Fall / 35

Bates and Elman and their coauthors cheerfully concede this point: “No learn¬
ing rule can be entirely devoid oftheoretical content nor can the tabu la ewe r be
completely rasa."13 They explain:

There is a widespread belief that connectionist models (and modelers)
are committed to an extreme form of empiricism; and that any form of
innate knowledge is to be avoided like the plague.... We obviously do
not subscribe to this point of view.... There are good reasons to believe
that some kinds of prior constraints [on learning models] are necessary.

In fact, all connectionist models necessarily make some assumptions
which must be regarded as constituting innate constraints."

The disagreements between the two poles, though significant, are over the
details: how many innate learning networks there are, and how specifically en¬
gineered they are for particular jobs. (We will explore some of these disagree¬
ments in Chapter 5.)

A third idea: An infinite range of behavior can be generated by finite combi¬
natorial programs in the mind. Cognitive science has undermined the Blank
Slate and the Ghost in the Machine in another way. People can be forgiven for
scoffing at the suggestion that human behavior is "in the genes" or “a product
of evolution" in the senses familiar from the animal world. Human acts are not
selected from a repertoire of knee-jerk reactions like a fish attacking a red spot
or a hen sitting on eggs. Instead, people may worship goddesses, auction kitsch
on the Internet, play air guitar, fast to atone for past sins, build forts out of
lawn chairs, and so on, seemingly without limit. A glance at National Geo¬
graphic shows that even the strangest acts in our own culture do not exhaust
what our species is capable of. If anything goes, one might think, then perhaps
we are Silly Putty, or unconstrained agents, after all.

But that impression has been made obsolete by the computational ap¬
proach to the mind, which was barely conceivable in the era in which the Blank
Slate arose. The clearest example is the Chomskyan revolution in language. 15
Language is the epitome of creative and variable behavior. Most utterances are
brand-new combinations of words, never before uttered in the history of hu¬
mankind. We are nothing like Tickle Me Elmo dolls who have a fixed list of
verbal responses hard-wired in. But, Chomsky pointed out, for all its open-
endedness language is not a free-for-all; it obeys rules and patterns. An English
speaker can utter unprecedented strings of words such as Every day new uni¬
verses come into existence, or He likes histoastwith cream cheese and ketchup, or
My car has been eaten by wolverines. But no one would say Car my been eaten
has wolverines by or most of the other possible orderings of English words.
Something in the head must be capable of generating not just any combina¬
tions of words but highly systematic ones.

36/The Blank Slate, the Noble Savage, and the Ghost in the Machine

That something is a kind of software, a generative grammar that can crank
out new arrangements of words. A battery of rules such as “An English sen¬
tence contains a subject and a predicate," “A predicate contains a verb, an ob¬
ject, and a complement," and "The subject of eat is the eater" can explain the
boundless creativity of a human talker. With a few thousand nouns that can fill
the subject slot and a few thousand verbs that can fill the predicate slot, one al¬
ready has several million ways to open a sentence. The possible combinations
quickly multiply out to unimaginably large numbers. Indeed, the repertoire of
sentences is theoretically infinite, because the rules of language use a trick
called recursion. A recursive rule allows a phrase to contain an example of it¬
self, as in She thinks that he thinks that they think that he knows and so on, ad
infinitum. And if the number of sentences is infinite, the number of possible
thoughts and intentions is infinite too, because virtually every sentence ex¬
presses a different thought or intention. The combinatorial grammar for lan¬
guage meshes with other combinatorial programs in the head for thoughts
and intentions. A fixed collection of machinery in the mind can generate an
infinite range of behavior by the muscles. i6

Once one starts to think about mental software instead of physical behav¬
ior, the radical differences among human cultures become far smaller, and that
leads to a fourth new idea: Universal mental mechanisms can underlie superfi¬
cial variation across cultures. Again, we can use language as a paradigm case of
the open-endedness of behavior. Humans speak some six thousand mutually
unintelligible languages. Nonetheless, the grammatical programs in their
minds differ far less than the actual speech coming out of their mouths. We
have known for a long time that all human languages can convey the same
kinds of ideas. The Bible has been translated into hundreds of non-Western
languages, and during World War II the U.S. Marine Corps conveyed secret
messages across the Pacific by having Navajo Indians translate them to and
from their native language. The fact that any language can be used to convey
any proposition, from theological parables to military directives, suggests that
all languages are cut from the same cloth.

Chomsky proposed that the generative grammars of individual languages
are variations on a single pattern, which he called Universal Grammar. For ex¬
ample, in English the verb comes before the object (drink beer) and the prepo¬
sition comes before the noun phrase (from the bottle). In Japanese the object
comes before the verb (beer drink) and the noun phrase comes before the
preposition, or, more accurately, the postposition (the bottle from). But it is a
significant discovery that both languages have verbs, objects, and pre- or post¬
positions to start with, as opposed to having the countless other conceivable
kinds of apparatus that could power a communication system. And it is even
more significant that unrelated languages build their phrases by assembling a
head (such as a verb or preposition) and a complement (such as a noun

The Last Wall to Fall / 37

phrase) and assigning a consistent order to the two. In English the head comes
first; in Japanese the head comes last. But everything else about the structure
of phrases in the two languages is pretty much the same. And so it goes with
phrase after phrase and language after language. The common kinds of heads
and complements can be ordered in 128 logically possible ways, but 95 percent
of the world's languages use one of two: either the English ordering or its mir¬
ror image the Japanese ordering, i? A simple way to capture this uniformity is
to say that all languages have the same grammar except for a parameter or
switch that can be flipped to either the "head-first" or "head-last" setting. The
linguist Mark Baker has recently summarized about a dozen of these parame¬
ters, which succinctly capture most of the known variation among the lan¬
guages of the world, is

Distilling the variation from the universal patterns is not just a way to tidy
up a set of messy data. It can also provide clues about the innate circuitry that
makes learning possible. If the universal part of a rule is embodied in the neu¬
ral circuitry that guides babies when they first learn language, it could explain
how children learn language so easily and uniformly and without the benefit
of instruction. Rather than treating the sound coming out ofMom's mouth as
just an interesting noise to mimic verbatim or to slice and dice in arbitrary
ways, the baby listens for heads and complements, pays attention to how they
are ordered, and builds a grammatical system consistent with that ordering.

This idea can make sense of other kinds of variability across cultures.
Many anthropologists sympathetic to social constructionism have claimed
that emotions familiar to us, like anger, are absent from some cultures." (A
few anthropologists say there are cultures with no emotions at all!)20 For ex¬
ample, Catherine Lutz wrote that the Ifaluk (a Micronesian people) do not ex¬
perience our “anger” but instead undergo an experience they call song. Song is
a state of dudgeon triggered by a moral infraction such as breaking a taboo or
acting in a cocky manner. It licenses one to shun, frown at, threaten, or gossip
about the offender, though not to attack him physically. The target of songex-
periences another emotion allegedly unknown to Westerners: metagu, a state
of dread that impels him to appease the song-ful one by apologizing, paying a
fine, or offering a gift.

The philosophers Ron Mallon and Stephen Stich, inspired by Chomsky
and other cognitive scientists, point out that the issue of whether to call Ifaluk
song&nd Western anger the same emotion or different emotions is a quibble
about the meaning of emotion words: whether they should be defined in
terms of surface behavior or underlying mental computation." If an emotion
is defined by behavior, then emotions certainly do differ across cultures. The
Ifaluk react emotionally to a woman working in the taro gardens while men¬
struating or to a man entering a birthing house, and we do not. We react emo¬
tionally to someone shouting a racial epithet or raising the middle finger, but

38/The Blank Slate, the Noble Savage, and the Ghost in the Machine

as far as we know, the Ifaluk do not. But if an emotion is defined by mental
mechanisms-what psychologists like Paul Ekman and Richard Lazarus call
"affect programs" or "if-then formulas" (note the computational vocabu-
lary)-we and the Haluk are not so different after all. 22 We might all be
equipped with a program that responds to an affront to our interests or our
dignity with an unpleasant burning feeling that motivates us to punish or to
exact compensation. But what counts as an affront, whether we feel it is per¬
missible to glower in a particular setting, and what kinds of retribution we
think we are entitled to, depend on our culture. The stimuli and responses may
differ, but the mental states are the same, whether or not they are perfectly la¬
beled by words in our language.

And as in the case of language, without some innate mechanism for men¬
tal computation, there would be no way to learn the parts of a culture that do
have to be learned. It is no coincidence that the situations that provoke song
among the Ifaluk include violating a taboo, being lazy or disrespectful, and re¬
fusing to share, but do not include respecting a taboo, being kind and deferen¬
tial, and standing on one's head. The Ifaluk construe the first three as similar
because they evoke the same affect program-they are perceived as affronts.
That makes it easier to learn that they call for the same reaction and makes it
more likely that those three would be lumped together as the acceptable trig¬
gers for a single emotion.

The moral, then, is that familiar categories of behavior-marriage cus¬
toms, food taboos, folk superstitions, and so on-certainly do vary across
cultures and have to be learned, but the deeper mechanisms of mental compu¬
tation that generate them may be universal and innate. People may dress dif¬
ferently, but they may all strive to flaunt their status via their appearance. They
may respect the rights of the members of their clan exclusively or they may ex¬
tend that respect to everyone in their tribe, nation-state, or species, but all di¬
vide the world into an in-group and an out-group. They may differ in which
outcomes they attribute to the intentions of conscious beings, some allowing
only that artifacts are deliberately crafted, others believing that illnesses come
from magical spells cast by enemies, still others believing that the entire world
was brought into being by a creator. But all of them explain certain events by
invoking the existence of entities with minds that strive to bring about goals.
The behaviorists got it backwards: it is the mind, not behavior, that is lawful.

A fifth idea: The mind is a complex system composed of many interacting
parts. The psychologists who study emotions in different cultures have made
another important discovery. Candid facial expressions appear to be the same
everywhere, but people in some cultures learn to keep a poker face in polite
company." A simple explanation is that the affect programs fire up facial ex¬
pressions in the same way in all people, but a separate system of "display rules"
governs when they can be shown.

The Last Wall to Tail! 39

The difference between these two mechanisms underscores another in¬
sight of the cognitive revolution. Before the revolution, commentators in¬
voked enormous black boxes such as “the intellect" or “the understanding,"
and they made sweeping pronouncements about human nature, such as that
we are essentially noble or essentially nasty. But we now know that the mind is
not a homogeneous orb invested with unitary powers or across-the-board
traits. The mind is modular, with many parts cooperating to generate a train
of thought or an organized action. It has distinct information-processing sys¬
tems for filtering out distractions, learning skills, controlling the body, re¬
membering facts, holding information temporarily, and storing and executing
rules. Cutting across these data-processing systems are mental faculties (some¬
times called multiple intelligences) dedicated to different kinds of content,
such as language, number, space, tools, and living things. Cognitive scientists \
at the East Pole suspect that the content-based modules are differentiated
largely by the genes;" those at the West Pole suspect they begin as small innate
biases in attention and then coagulate out of statistical patterns in the sensory
input." But those at both poles agree that the brain is not a uniform meatloaf.
Still another layer of information-processing systems can be found in the af¬
fect programs, that is, the systems for motivation and emotion.

The upshot is that an urge or habit coming out of one module can be
translated into behavior in different ways-or suppressed altogether-by
some other module. To take a simple example, cognitive psychologists believe
that a module called the "habit system" underlies our tendency to produce cer¬
tain responses habitually, such as responding to a printed word by pronounc¬
ing it silently. But another module, called the "supervisory attention system,"
can override it and focus on the information relevant to a stated problem, such
as naming the color of the ink the word is printed in, or thinking up an action
that goes with the word." More generally, the interplay of mental systems can
explain how people can entertain revenge fantasies that they never act on, or
can commit adultery only in their hearts. In this way the theory of human na¬
ture coming out of the cognitive revolution has more in common with the
Iudeo-Christian theory of human nature, and with the psychoanalytic theory
proposed by Sigmund Freud, than with behaviorism, social constructionism,
and other versions of the Blank Slate, Behavior is not just emitted or elicited,"
nor does it come directly out of culture or society. It comes from an internal
struggle among mental modules with differing agendas and goals.

The idea from the cognitive revolution that the mind is a system of uni¬
versal, generative computational modules obliterates the way that debates on
human nature have been framed for centuries. It is now simply misguided to
ask whether humans are flexible or programmed, whether behavior is univer¬
sal or varies across cultures, whether acts are learned or innate, whether we are
essentially good or essentially evil. Humans behave flexibly because they are

40/The Blank Slate, the Noble Savage, and the Ghost in the Machine

programmed: their minds are packed with combinatorial software that can
generate an unlimitedset of thoughts and behavior. Behavior may vary across
cultures, but the design of the mental programs that generate it need not vary.
Intelligent behavior is learned successfully because we have innate systems
that do the learning. And all people may have good and evil motives, but not
everyone may translate them into behavior in the same way.

THE SECOND BRIDGE between mind and matter is neuroscience, especially
cognitive neuroscience, the study of how cognition and emotion are imple¬
mented in the brain." Francis Crick wrote a book about the brain called The
Astonishing Hypothesis, alluding to the idea that all our thoughts and feelings,
joys and aches, dreams and wishes consist in the physiological activity of the
brain." Jaded neuroscientists, who take the idea for granted, snickered at the
title, but Crick was right: the hypothesis is astonishing to most people the first
time they stop to ponder it. Who cannot sympathize with the imprisoned
Dmitri Karamazov as he tries to make sense of what he has just learned from a
visiting academic?

Imagine: inside, in the nerves, in the head-that is, these nerves are
there in the brain ... (damn them!) there are sort oflittle tails, the little
tails of those nerves, and as soon as they begin quivering ... that is, you
see, I look at something with my eyes and then they begin quivering,
those little tails ... and when they quiver, then an image appears ... it
doesn't appear at once, but an instant, a second, passes... and then
something like a moment appears; that is, not a moment-devil take the
moment! -but an image; that is, an object, or an action, damn it! That's
why I see and then think, because of those tails, not at all because I've got
a soul, and that I am some sort of image and likeness. All that is non¬
sense! Rakitin explained it all to me yesterday, brother, and it simply
bowled me over. It's magnificent, Alyosha, this science! A new man's
arising-that I understand_And yet I am sorry to lose God!29

Dostoevsky's prescience is itself astonishing, because in 1880 only the
rudiments of neural functioning were understood, and a reasonable person
could have doubted that all experience arises from quivering nerve tails. But
no longer. One can say that the information-processing activity of the brain
causes the mind, or one can say that it is the mind, but in either case the evi¬
dence is overwhelming that every aspect of our mental lives depends entirely
on physiological events in the tissues of the brain.

When a surgeon sends an electrical current into the brain, the person can
have a vivid, lifelike experience. When chemicals seep into the brain, they can
alter the person's perception, mood, personality, and reasoning. When a patch

The Last Wall to Fall! 41

of brain tissue dies, a part of the mind can disappear: a neurological patient
may lose the ability to name tools, recognize faces, anticipate the outcome of
his behavior, empathize with others, or keep in mind a region of space or of his
own body. (Descartes was thus wrong when he said that «the mind is entirely
indivisible" and concluded that it must be completely different from the
body.) Every emotion and thought gives off physical signals, and the new tech¬
nologies for detecting them are so accurate that they can literally read a per¬
son's mind and tell a cognitive neuroscientist whether the person is imagining
a face or a place. Neuroscientists can knock a gene out of a mouse (a gene also
found in humans) and prevent the mouse from learning, or insert extra copies
and make the mouse learn faster. Under the microscope, brain tissue shows a
staggering complexity—a hundred billion neurons connected by a hundred
trillion synapses-that is commensurate with the staggering complexity of
human thought and experience. Neural network modelers have begun to
show how the building blocks of mental computation, such as storing and re¬
trieving a pattern, can be implemented in neural circuitry. And when the brain
dies, the person goes out of existence. Despite concerted efforts by Alfred Rus¬
sel Wallace and other Victorian scientists, it is apparently not possible to com¬
municate with the dead.

Educated people, of course, know that perception, cognition, language,
and emotion are rooted in the brain. But it is still tempting to think of the
brain as it was shown in old educational cartoons, as a control panel with
gauges and levers operated by a user-the self, the soul, the ghost, the person,
the “me.” But cognitive neuroscience is showing that the self, too, is just an¬
other network of brain systems.

The first hint came from Phineas Gage, the nineteenth-century railroad
worker familiar to generations ofpsychology students. Gage was using a yard-
long spike to tamp explosive powder into a hole in a rock when a spark ignited
the powder and sent the spike into his cheekbone, through his brain, and out
the top of his skull. Phineas survived with his perception, memory, language,
and motor functions intact. But in the famous understatement of a co-worker,
"Gage was no longer Gage." A piece of iron had literally turned him into a dif¬
ferent person, from courteous, responsible, and ambitious to rude, unreliable,
and shiftless. It did this by impaling his ventromedial prefrontal cortex, the re¬
gion of the brain above the eyes now known to be involved in reasoning about
other people. Together with other areas of the prefrontal lobes and the limbic
system (the seat of the emotions), it anticipates the consequences of one’s ac¬
tions and selects behavior consonant with one's goals.P

Cognitive neuroscientists have not only exorcised the ghost but have
shown that the brain does not even have a part that does exactly what the ghost
is supposed to do: review all the facts and make a decision for the rest of the
brain to carry out." Each of us feels that there is a single "I" in control. But that

42/The Blank Slate, the Noble Savage, and the Ghost in the Machine

is an illusion that the brain works hard to produce, like the impression that our
visual fields are rich in detail from edge to edge. (In fact, we are blind to detail
outside the fixation point. We quickly move our eyes to whatever looks inter¬
esting, and that fools us into thinking that the detail was there all along.) The
brain does have supervisory systems in the prefrontal lobes and anterior cin¬
gulate cortex, which can push the buttons ofbehavior and override habits and
urges. But those systems are gadgets with specific quirks and limitations; they
are not implementations ofthe rational free agent traditionally identified with
the soul or the self.

One of the most dramatic demonstrations of the illusion of the unified
self comes from the neuroscientists Michael Gazzaniga and Roger Sperry, who
showed that when surgeons cut the corpus callosum joining the cerebral
hemispheres, they literally cut the self in two, and each hemisphere can exer¬
cise free will without the other one's advice or consent. Even more disconcert¬
ingly, the left hemisphere constantly weaves a coherent but false account of the
behavior chosen without its knowledge by the right. For example, if an exper¬
imenter flashes the command ((WALK" to the right hemisphere (by keeping it
in the part ofthe visual field that only the right hemisphere can see), the per¬
son will comply with the request and begin to walk out ofthe room. But when
the person (specifically, the person's left hemisphere) is asked why he just got
up, he will say, in all sincerity, "To get a Coke" -rather than ((I don't really
know" or "The urge just came over me" or "You've been testing me for years
since 1 had the surgery, and sometimes you get me to do things but I don't
know exactly what you asked me to do." Similarly, if the patient’s left hemi¬
sphere is shown a chicken and his right hemisphere is shown a snowfall, and
both hemispheres have to select a picture that goes with what they see (each
using a different hand), the left hemisphere picks a claw (correctly) and the
right picks a shovel (also correctly). But when the left hemisphere is asked why
the whole person made those choices, it blithely says, "Oh, that’s simple. The
chicken claw goes with the chicken, and you need a shovel to clean out the
chicken shed."32

The spooky part is that we have no reason to think that the baloney-
generator in the patient’s left hemisphere is behaving any differently from ours
as we make sense ofthe inclinations emanating from the rest ofowrbrains. The
conscious mind—the self or soul-is a spin doctor, not the commander in
chief. Sigmund Freud immodestly wrote that "humanity has in the course of
time had to endure from the hands of science three great outrages upon its
naive self-love": the discovery that our world isnot the center of the celestial....^
spheres but rather a speck in a vast universe, the discovery that we were not
specially created but instead descended from animals, and the discovery that
often our conscious minds do not control how we act but merely tell us a story
about our actions. He was right about the cumulative impact, but it was

The Last Wall to Fall / 43

cognitive neuroscience rather than psychoanalysis that conclusively delivered
the third blow.

Cognitive neuroscience is undermining not just the Ghost in the Machine
but also the Noble Savage. Damage to the frontal lobes does not only dull the
person or subtract from his behavioral repertoire but can unleash aggressive
attacks." That happens because the damaged lobes no longer serve as in¬
hibitory brakes on parts of the limbic system, particularly a circuit that links
the amygdala to the hypothalamus via a pathway called the stria terminalis.
Connections between the frontal lobe in each hemisphere and the limbic sys¬
tem provide a lever by which a person's knowledge and goals can override
other mechanisms, and among those mechanisms appears to be one designed
to generate behavior that harms other people."

Nor is the physical structure of the brain a blank slate. In the mid-
nineteenth century the neurologist Paul Broca discovered that the folds and
wrinkles of the cerebral cortex do not squiggle randomly like fingerprints
but have a recognizable geometry. Indeed, the arrangement is so consistent
from brain to brain that each fold and wrinkle can be given a name. Since that
time neuroscientists have discovered that the gross anatomy of the brain-the
sizes, shapes, and connectivity of its lobes and nuclei, and the basic plan of
the cerebral cortex-is largely shaped by the genes in normal prenatal devel¬
opment. 35 So is the quantity of gray matter in the different regions of the
brains of different people, including the regions that underlie language and
reasoning."

This innate geometry and cabling can have real consequences for think¬
ing, feeling, and behavior. As we shall see in a later chapter, babies who suffer
damage to particular areas of the brain often grow up with permanent deficits
in particular mental faculties. And people born with variations on the typical
plan have variations in the way their minds work. According to a recent study
of the brains of identical and fraternal twins, differences in the amount of gray
matter in the frontal lobes are not only genetically influenced but are signifi¬
cantly correlated with differences in intelligence." A study of Albert Einstein's
brain revealed that he had large, unusually shaped inferior parietal lobules,
which participate in spatial reasoning and intuitions about number." Gay
men are likely to have a smaller third interstitial nucleus in the anterior hypo¬
thalamus, a nucleus known to have a role in sex differences." And convicted
murderers and other violent, antisocial people are likely to have a smaller and
less active prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that governs decision making
and inhibits impulses." These gross features of the brain are almost certainly
not sculpted by information coming in from the senses, which implies that
differences in intelligence, scientific genius, sexual orientation, and impulsive
violence are not entirely learned.

Indeed, until recently the innateness of brain structure was an embarrass-

44/The Blank Slate, the Noble Savage, and the Ghost in the Machine

ment for neuroscience. The brain could not possibly be wired by the genes
down to the last synapse, because there isn't nearly enough information in the
genome to do so. And we know that people learn throughout their lives, and
the products of that learning have to be stored in the brain somehow. Unless
you believe in a ghost in the machine, everything a person learns has to affect
some part of the brain; more accurately, learning is a change in some part of
the brain. But it was difficult to find the features of the brain that reflected
those changes amid all that innate structure. Becoming stronger in math or
motor coordination or visual discrimination does not bulk up the brain the
way becoming stronger at weightlifting bulks up the muscles.

Now, at last, neuroscience is beginning to catch up with psychology by dis¬
covering changes inthe brain that underlie learning. As we shall see, the bound¬
aries between swatches of cortex devoted to different body parts, talents, and
even physical senses can be adjusted by learning and practice. Some neurosci¬
entists are so excifed by these discoveries that they are trying to push the pen¬
dulum in the other direction, emphasizing the plasticity of the cerebral cortex.
But for reasons that I will review in Chapter 5, most neuroscientists believe
that these changes take place within a matrix of genetically organized struc¬
ture. There is much we don't understand about how the brain is laid out in de¬
velopment, but we know that it is not indefinitely malleable by experience.

THE THIRD BRIDGE between the biological and the mental is behavioral ge¬
netics, the study of how genes affect behavior." All the potential for thinking,
learning, and feeling that distinguishes humans from other animals lies in the
information contained in the DNA of the fertilized ovum. This is most obvi¬
ous when we compare species. Chimpanzees brought up in a human home do
not speak, think, or act like people, and that is because of the information in
the ten megabytes of DNA that differ between us. Even the two species of
chimpanzees, common chimps and bonobos, which differ in just a few tenths
of one percent of their genomes, part company in their behavior, as zookeep¬
ers first discovered when they inadvertently mixed the two. Common chimps
are among the most aggressive mammals known to zoology, bonobos among
the most peaceable; in common chimps the males dominate the females, in
bonobos the females have the upper hand; common chimps have sex for pro¬
creation, bonobos for recreation. Small differences in the genes can lead to
large differences in behavior. They can affect the size and shape of the different
parts of the brain, their wiring, and the nanotechnology that releases, binds,
and recycles hormones and neurotransmitters.

The importance of genes in organizing the normal brain is underscored
by the many ways in which nonstandard genes can give rise to nonstandard
minds. When I was an undergraduate an exam question in Abnormal Psychol¬
ogy asked,"What is the best predictor that aperson will become schizophrenic?"

The Last Wall to Fall / 45

The answer was, "Having an identical twin who is schizophrenic:' At the time
it was a trick question, because the reigning theories of schizophrenia pointed
to societal stress, "schizophrenogenic mothers;' double binds, and other life
experiences (none of which turned out to have much, if any, importance);
hardly anyone thought about genes as a possible cause. But even then the evi¬
dence was there: schizophrenia is highly concordant within pairs of identical
twins, who share all their DNA and most of their environment, but far less
concordant within pairs of fraternal twins, who share only half their DNA (of
the DNA that varies in the population) and most of their environment. The
trick question could be asked-and would have the same answer-for virtu¬
ally every cognitive and emotional disorder or difference ever observed.
Autism, dyslexia, language delay, language impairment, learn disability,
left-handedness, major depressions, bipolar illness, obsessive-compulsive dis¬
order, sexual orientation, and many other conditions run in families, are more
concordant in identical than in fraternal twins, are better predicted by people's
biological relatives than by their adoptive relatives, and are poorly predicted by
any measurable feature of the environment.f

Genes not only push us toward exceptional conditions of mental function¬
ing but scatter us within the normal range, producing much of the variation in
ability and temperament that we notice in the people around us. The famous
Chas Addams cartoon from TheNew Yorker is only a slight exaggeration:

Separated at birth, the Malliftrt twins meet accidentally.

©The New Yorker Collection 1981 . Charles Addams from cartoonbank.com. All rights reserved.

46/The Blank Slate, the Noble Savage, and the Ghost in the Machine

Identical twins think and feel in such similar ways that they sometimes
suspect they are linked by telepathy. When separated at birth and reunited as
adults, they say they feel they have known each other all their lives. Testing
confirms that identical twins, whether separated at birth or not, are eerily alike
(though far from identical) in just about any trait one can measure. They are
similar in verbal, mathematical, and general intelligence, in their degree of life
satisfaction, and in personality traits such as introversion, agreeableness, neu-
roticism, conscientiousness, and openness to experience. They have similar at¬
titudes toward controversial issues such as the death penalty, religion, and
modern music. They resemble each other not just in paper-and-pencil tests
but in consequential behavior such as gambling, divorcing, committing
crimes, getting into accidents, and watching television. And they boast dozens
of shared idiosyncrasies such as giggling incessantly, giving interminable an¬
swers to simple questions, dipping buttered toast in coffee, and-in the case of
Abigail van Buren and Ann Landers-writing indistinguishable syndicated
advice columns. The crags and valleys of their electroencephalograms (brain¬
waves) are as alike as those of a single person recorded on two occasions, and
the wrinkles of their brains and distribution of gray matter across cortical
areas are also similar."

The effects of differences in genes on differences in minds can be meas¬
ured, and the same rough estimate-substantially greater than zero, but sub¬
stantially less than 100 percent-pops out of the data no matter what
measuring stick is used. Identical twins are far more similar than fraternal
twins, whether they are raised apart or together; identical twins raised apart
are highly similar; biological siblings, whether raised together or apart, are far
more similar than adoptive siblings. Many of these conclusions come, from
massive studies in Scandinavian countries where governments keep huge
databases on their citizens, and they employ the best-validated measuring in¬
struments known to psychology. Skeptics have offered alternative explana¬
tions that try to push the effects of the genes to zero-they suggest that
identical twins separated at birth may have been placed in similar adoptive
homes, that they may have contacted each other before being tested, that they
look alike and hence may have been treated alike, and that they shared a womb
in addition to their genes. But as we shall see in the chapter on children, these
explanations have all been tested and rejected. Recently a new kind of evidence
may be piled on the heap. "Virtual twins" are the mirror image of identical
twins raised apart: they are unrelated siblings, one or both adopted, who are
raised together from infancy. Though they are the same age and are growing
up in the same family,the psychologist Nancy Segalfound that their IQ scores
are barely correlated." One father in the study said that despite efforts to treat
them alike, the virtual twins are "like night and day.”

Twinning and adoption are natural experiments that offer strong indirect

The Last Wall to Fall / 47

evidence that differences in minds can come from differences in genes. Re¬
cently geneticists have pinpointed some of the genes that can cause the differ¬
ences. A single wayward nucleotide in a gene called FOXP2 causes a hereditary
disorder in speech and language.P A gene on the same chromosome, LIM-
kinasel, produces a protein found in growing neurons that helps install the
faculty of spatial cognition: when the gene is deleted, the person has normal in¬
telligence but cannot assemble objects, arrange blocks, or copy shapes." One
version of the gene IGF2R is associated with high general intelligence, ac¬
counting for as many as four IQ points and two percent of the variation in in¬
telligence among normal individuals." If you have a longer than average
version of the D4DR dopamine receptor gene, you are more likely to be a thrill
seeker, the kind of person who jumps out of airplanes, clambers up frozen wa¬
terfalls, or has sex with strangers." If you have a shorter version of a stretch of
DNA that inhibits the serotonin transporter gene on chromosome 17, you are
more likely to be neurotic and anxious, the kind ofperson who can barelyfunc-
tion at social gatherings for fear of offending someone or acting like a fool."

Single genes with large consequences are the most dramatic examples of
the effects of genes on the mind, but they are not the most representative ex¬
amples. Most psychological traits are the product of many genes with small ef¬
fects that are modulated by the presence of other genes, rather than the
product of a single gene with a large effect that shows up come what may. That
is why studies of identical twins (two people who share «// their genes) consis¬
tently show powerful genetic effects on a trait even when the search for a sin¬
glegene for that trait is unsuccessful.

In 2001 the complete sequence of the human genome was published, and
with it came a powerful new ability to identify genes and their products, in¬
cluding those that are active in the brain. In the coming decade, geneticists will
identify genes that differentiate us from chimpanzees, infer which of them
were subject to natural selection during the millions of years our ancestors
evolved into humans, identify which combinations are associated with nor¬
mal, abnormal, and exceptional mental abilities, and begin to trace the chain
of causation in fetal development by which genes shape the brain systems that
let us learn, feel, and act.

People sometimes fear that if the genes affect the mind at all they must de¬
termine it in every detail. That is wrong, for two reasons. The first is that most
effects of genes are probabilistic. If one identical twin has a trait, there is usu¬
ally no more than an even chance that the other will have it, despite their hav¬
ing a complete genome in common. Behavioral geneticists estimate that only
about, half of the variation in most psychological traits within a given envi¬
ronment correlates with the genes. In the chapter on children, we will explore
what this means and where the other half of the variation comes from.

The second reason that genes aren't everything is that their effects can

48/The Blank Slate, the Noble Savage, and the Ghost in the Machine

vary depending on the environment. A simple example maybe found in any
genetics textbook. While different strains of corn grown in a single field will
vary in height because of their genes, a single strain of corn grown in different
fields-one arid, the other irrigated-will vary in height because of the envi¬
ronment. A human example comes from Woody Allen. Though his fame, for¬
tune, and ability to attract beautiful women may depend on having genes that
enhance a sense of humor, in Stardust Memories he explains to an envious
childhood friend that there is a crucial environmental factor as well: "We live
in a society that puts a big value on jokes .... If I had been an Apache Indian,
those guys didn't need comedians, so I'd be out of work."

The meaning of findings in behavioral genetics for our understanding of
human nature has to be worked out for each case. An aberrant gene that causes
a disorder shows that the standard version of the gene is necessary to have a
normal human mind. But what the standard version does is not immediately
obvious. If a gear with a broken tooth goes clunkon every turn, we do not con¬
clude that the tooth in its intact form was a clunk-suppressor. And so a gene
that disrupts a mental ability need not be a defective version of a gene that is
"for'l that ability. It may produce a toxin that interferes with normal brain de¬
velopment, or it may leave a chink in the immune system that allows a
pathogen to infect the brain, or it may make the person look stupid or sinister
and thereby affect how other people react to him. In the past, geneticists
couldn't rule out the boring possibilities (the ones that don't involve brain
function directly), and skeptics intimated that ^//genetic effects might be bor¬
ing, merely warping or defacing a blank slate rather than being an ineffective
version of a gene that helps to give structure to a complex brain. But increas¬
ingly researchers are able to tie genes to the brain.

A promising example is the FOXP2 gene, associated with a speech and lan¬
guage disorder in a large family. 50 The aberrant nucleotide has been found in
every impaired member of the family (and in one unrelated person with the
same syndrome), but it was not found in any of the unimpaired members, nor
was it found in 364 chromosomes from unrelated normal people. The gene
belongs to a family of genes for transcription factors-proteins that turn on
other genes-that are known to play important roles in embryogenesis. The
mutation disrupts the part of the protein that latches onto a particular region
of DNA, the key step in turning on the right gene at the right time. The gene
appears to be strongly active in fetal brain tissue, and a closely related version
found in mice is active in the developing cerebral cortex. These are signs, ac¬
cording to the authors of the study, that the normal version of the gene trig¬
gers a cascade of events that help organize a part of the developing brain.

The meaning of genetic variation among normal individuals (as opposed
to genetic defects that cause a disorder) also has to be thought through with
care. An innate difference among people is not the same thing as an innate

The Last Wall to Fall / 49

human nature that is universal across the species. Documenting the ways that
people vary will not directly reveal the workings of human nature, any more
than documenting the ways that automobiles vary will directly reveal how car
engines work. Nonetheless, genetic variation certainly has implications for
human nature. If there are many ways for a mind to vary genetically, the mind
must have many genetically influenced parts and attributes that make the vari¬
ation possible. Also, any modern conception of human nature that is rooted in
biology (as opposed to traditional conceptions of human nature that are
rooted in philosophy, religion, or common sense) must predict that the facul¬
ties making up human nature show quantitative variation, even if their funda¬
mental design (how they work) is universal. Natural selection depends on
genetic variation, and though it reduces that variation as it shapes organisms
over the generations, it never uses it up completely. 51

Whatever their exact interpretation turns out to be, the findings of behav¬
ioral genetics are highly damaging to the Blank Slate and its companion doc¬
trines. The slate cannot be blank if different genes can make it more or less
smart, articulate, adventurous, shy, happy, conscientious, neurotic, open, in¬
troverted, giggly, spatially challenged, or likely to dip buttered toast in coffee.
For genes to affect the mind in all these ways, the mind must have many parts
and features for the genes to affect. Similarly, if the mutation or deletion of a
gene can target a cognitive ability as specific as spatial construction or a per¬
sonality trait as specific as sensation-seeking, that trait may be a distinct com¬
ponent of a complex psyche.

Moreover, many of the traits affected by genes are far from noble. Psy¬
chologists have discovered that our personalities differ in five major ways: we
are to varying degrees introverted or extroverted, neurotic or stable, incurious
or open to experience, agreeable or antagonistic, and conscientious or undi¬
rected. Most of the 18,000 adjectives for personality traits in an unabridged
dictionary can be tied to one of these five dimensions, including such sins and
flaws as being aimless, careless, conforming, impatient, narrow, rude, self-
pitying, selfish, suspicious, uncooperative, and undependable. All five of the
major personality dimensions are heritable, with perhaps 40 to 50 percent of
the variation in a typical population tied to differences in their genes. The un¬
fortunate wretch who is introverted, neurotic, narrow, selfish, and undepend¬
able is probably that way in part because of his genes, and so, most likely, are
the rest of us who have tendencies in any of those directions as compared with
our fellows.

It's not just unpleasant temperaments that are partly heritable, but actual
behavior with real consequences. Study after study has shown that a willing¬
ness to commit antisocial acts, including lying, stealing, starting fights, and de¬
stroying property, is partly heritable (though like all heritable traits it is
exercised more in some environments than in othersl.v People who commit

SO/The Blank Slate, the Noble Savage, and the Ghost in the Machine

truly heinous acts, such as bilking elderly people out of their life savings, rap¬
ing a succession of women, or shooting convenience store clerks lying on the
floor during a robbery, are often diagnosed with "psychopathy" or "antisocial
personality disorder."? Most psychopaths showed signs of malice from the
time they were children. They bullied smaller children, tortured animals, lied
habitually, and were incapable of empathy or remorse, often despite normal
family backgrounds and the best efforts of their distraught parents. Most ex¬
perts on psychopathy believe that it comes from a genetic predisposition,
though in some cases it may come from early brain damage. 54 In either case
genetics and neuroscience are showing that a heart of darkness cannot always
be blamed on parents or society.

And the genes, even if they by no means seal our fate, don't sit easily with
the intuition that we are ghosts in machines either. Imagine that you are ago¬
nizing over a choice-which career to pursue, whether to get married, howto
vote, what to wear that day. You have finally staggered to a decision when the
phone rings. It is the identical twin you never knew you had. During the joy¬
ous conversation it comes out that she has just chosen a similar career, has de¬
cided to get married at around the same time, plans to cast her vote for the
same presidential candidate, and is wearing a shirt of the same color-just as
the behavioral geneticists who tracked you down would have bet. How much
discretion did the "you" making the choices actually have if the outcome could
have been predicted in advance, at least probabilistically, based on events that
took place in your mother's Fallopian tubes decades ago?

THE FOURTH BRIDGE from biology to culture is evolutionary psychology, the
study of the phylogenetic history and adaptive functions of the mind. 55 It
holds out the hope of understanding the design or purpose of the mind-s-not
in some mystical or teleological sense, but in the sense of the simulacrum of
engineering that pervades the natural world. We see these signs of engineering
everywhere: in eyes that seem designed to form images, in hearts that seem de¬
signed to pump blood, in wings that seem designed to lift birds in flight.

Darwin showed, of course, that the illusion of design in the natural world
can be explained by natural selection. Certainly an eye is too well engineered
to have arisen by chance. No wart or tumor or product of a big mutation could
be lucky enough to have a lens, an iris, a retina, tear ducts, and so on, all per¬
fectly arranged to form an image. Nor is the eye a masterpiece of engineering
literally fashioned by a cosmic designer who created humans in his own image.
The human eye is uncannily similar to the eyes of other organisms and has
quirky vestiges of extinct ancestors, such as a retina that appears to have been
installed backwards." Today's organs are replicas of organs in our ancestors
whose design worked better than the alternatives, thereby enabling them to be¬
come our ancestors. 57 Natural selection is the only physical process we know of

The Last Wall to Fall / 51

that can simulate engineering, because it is the only process in which how well
something works can playa causal role in how it came to be.

Evolution is central to the understanding of life, including human life.
Like all living things, we are outcomes of natural selection; we got here because
we inherited traits that allowed our ancestors to survive, find mates, and re¬
produce. This momentous fact explains our deepest strivings: why having a
thankless child is sharper than a serpent’s tooth, why it is a truth universally
acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in
want of a wife, why we do not go gentle into that good night but rage, rage
against the dying of the light.

Evolution is central to understanding ourselves because signs of design in
human beings do not stop at the heart or the eye. For all its exquisite engi¬
neering, an eye is useless without a brain. Its output is not the meaningless
patterns of a screen saver, but raw material for circuitry that computes a rep¬
resentation of the external world. That representation feeds other circuits that
make sense of the world by imputing causes to events and placing them in cat¬
egories that allow useful predictions. And that sense-making, in turn, works in
the service of motives such as hunger, fear, love, curiosity, and the pursuit of
status and esteem. As I mentioned, abilities that seem effortless to us-catego-
rizing events, deducing cause and effect, and pursuing conflicting goals-are
major challenges in designing an intelligent system, ones that robot designers
strive, still unsuccessfully, to duplicate.

So signs of engineering in the human mind go all the way up, and that is
why psychology has always been evolutionary. Cognitive and emotional facul¬
ties have always been recognized as nonrandom, complex, and useful, and that
means they must be products either of divine design or of natural selection.
But until recently evolution was seldom explicitly invoked within psychology,
because with many topics, folk intuitions about what is adaptive are good
enough to make headway. You don't need an evolutionary biologist to tell you
that depth perception keeps an animal from falling off cliffs and bumping into
trees, that thirst keeps it from drying out, or that it's better to remember what
works and what doesn't than to be an amnesiac.

But with other aspects of our mental life, particularly in the social realm,
the function of a faculty is not so easy to guess. Natural selection favors organ¬
isms that are good at reproducing in some environment. When the environ¬
ment consists of rocks, grass, and snakes, it's fairly obvious which strategies
work and which ones don't. But when the relevant environment consists of
other members of the species evolving their own strategies, it is not so obvi¬
ous. In the game of evolution, is it better to be monogamous or polygamous?
Gentle or aggressive? Cooperative or selfish? Indulgent with children or stern
with them? Optimistic, pragmatic, or pessimistic?

For questions like these, hunches are unhelpful, and that is whyevolu-

52/The Blank Slate, the Noble Savage, and the Ghost in the Machine

tionary biology has increasingly been brought into psychology. Evolutionary
biologists tell us that it is a mistake to think of anything conducive to people's
well-being-group cohesion, the avoidance of violence, monogamous pair
bonding, aesthetic pleasure, self-esteem-as an «adaptation." What is "adap¬
tive" in everyday life is not necessarily an «adaptation" in the technical sense
of being a trait that was favored by natural selection in a species' evolutionary
history. Natural selection is the morally indifferent process in which the most
effective replicators outreproduce the alternatives and come to prevail in a
population. The selected genes will therefore be the «selfish" ones, in Richard
Dawkins's metaphor-more accurately, the megalomaniacal ones, those that
make the most copies of themselves.ss An adaptation is anything brought
about by the genes that helps them fulfill this metaphorical obsession,
whether or not it also fulfills human aspirations. And this is a strikingly dif¬
ferent conception from our everyday intuitions about what our faculties were
designed for.

The megalomania of the genes does not mean that benevolence and co¬
operation cannot evolve, any more than the law of gravity proves that flight
cannot evolve. It means only that benevolence, like flight, is a special state of
affairs in need of an explanation, not something that just happens. It can
evolve only in particular circumstances and has to be supported by a suite of
cognitive and emotional faculties. Thus benevolence (and other social mo¬
tives) must be dragged into the spotlight rather than treated as part of the fur¬
niture. In the sociobiological revolution of the 1970s, evolutionary biologists
replaced the fuzzy feeling that organisms evolve to serve the greater good with
deductions of what kinds of motives are likely to evolve when organisms in¬
teract with offspring, mates, siblings, friends, strangers, and adversaries.

When the predictions were combined with some basic facts about the
hunter-gatherer lifestyle in which humans evolved, parts of the psyche that
were previously inscrutable turned out to have a rationale as legible as those
for depth perception and the regulation of thirst. An eye for beauty, for exam¬
ple, locks onto faces that show signs of health and fertility-just as one would
predict if it had evolved to help the beholder find the fittest mate. 59 The emo¬
tions of sympathy, gratitude, guilt, and anger allow people to benefit from co¬
operation without being exploited by liars and cheats/" A reputation for
toughness and a thirst for revenge were the best defense against aggression in
a world in which one could not call 911 to summon the police." Children ac¬
quire spoken language instinctively but written language only by the sweat of
their brow, because spoken language has been a feature of human life for tens
or hundreds of millennia whereas written language is a recent and slow-
spreading invention/?

None of this means that people literally strive to replicate their genes. If
that's how the mind worked, men would line up outside sperm banks and

The Last Wall to Fall / 53

women would pay to have their eggs harvested and given away to infertile cou¬
ples. It means only that inherited systems for learning, thinking, and feeling
have a design that would have led, on average, to enhanced survival and repro¬
duction in the environment in which our ancestors evolved. People enjoy eat¬
ing, and in a world without junk food, that led them to nourish themselves,
even if the nutritional content of the food never entered their minds. People
love sex and love children, and in a world without contraception, that was
enough for the genes to take care of themselves.

The difference between the mechanisms that impel organisms to behave
in real time and the mechanisms that shaped the design of the organism over
evolutionary time is important enough to merit some jargon. A proximate
cause of behavior is the mechanism that pushes behavior buttons in real time,
such as the hunger and lust that impel people to eat and have sex. An ultimate
cause is the adaptive rationale that led the proximate cause to evolve, such as
the need for nutrition and reproduction that gave us the drives of hunger and
lust. The distinction between proximate and ultimate causation is indispens¬
able in understanding ourselves because it determines the answer to every
question of the form "Why did that person act as he did?" To take a simple ex¬
ample, ultimately people crave sex in order to reproduce (because the ultimate
cause of sex is reproduction), but proximately they may do everything they
can not to reproduce (because the proximate cause of sex is pleasure).

The difference between proximate and ultimate goals is another kind of
proof that we are not blank slates. Whenever people strive for obvious rewards
like health and happiness, which make sense both proximately and ultimately,
one could plausibly suppose that the mind is equipped only with a desire to be
happy and healthy and a cause-and-effect calculus that helps them get what
they want. But people often have desires that subvert their proximate well¬
being, desires that they cannot articulate and that they (and their society) may
try unsuccessfully to extirpate. They may covet their neighbor's spouse, eat
themselves into an early grave, explode over minor slights, fail to love their
stepchildren, rev up their bodies in response to a stressor that they cannot fight
or flee, exhaust themselves keeping up with the Ioneses or climbing the corpo¬
rate ladder, and prefer a sexy and dangerous partner to a plain but dependable
one. These personally puzzling drives have a transparent evolutionary ratio¬
nale, and they suggest that the mind is packed with cravings shaped by natural
selection, not with a generic desire for personal well-being.

Evolutionary psychology also explains why the slate is not blank. The
mind was forged in Darwinian competition, and an inert medium would
have been outperformed by rivals outfitted with high technology-with
acute perceptual systems, savvyproblem-solvers, cunning strategists, and sen¬
sitive feedback circuits. Worse still, if our minds were truly malleable they
would be easily manipulated by our rivals, who could mold or condition us

54/The Blank Slate, the Noble Savage, and the Ghost in the Machine

into serving their needs rather than our own. A malleable mind would
quickly be selected out.

Researchers in the human sciences have begun to flesh out the hypothesis
that the mind evolved with a universal complex design. Some anthropologists
have returned to an ethnographic record that used to trumpet differences
among cultures and have found an astonishingly detailed set of aptitudes and
tastes that all cultures have in common. This shared way of thinking, feeling,
and living makes us look like a single tribe, which the anthropologist Donald
Brown has called the Universal People, after Chomsky's Universal Crammar/"
Hundreds of traits, from fear of snakes to logical operators, from romantic
love to humorous insults, from poetry to food taboos, from exchange of goods
to mourning the dead, can be found in every society ever documented. It's
not that every universal behavior directly reflects a universal component of
human nature-many arise from an interplay between universal properties of
the mind, universal properties of the body, and universal properties of the
world. Nonetheless, the sheer richness and detail in the rendering of the Uni¬
versal People comes as a shock to any intuition that the mind is a blank slate or
that cultures can vary without limit, and there is something on the list to refute
almost any theory growing out of those intuitions. Nothing can substitute for
seeing Brown's list in full; it is reproduced, with his permission, as an appen¬
dix (see p. 435).

The idea that natural selection has endowed humans with a universal
complex mind has received support from other quarters. Child psychologists
no longer believe that the world of an infant is a blooming, buzzing confusion,
because they have found signs of the basic categories of mind (such as those
for objects, people, and tools) in young babies/" Archaeologists and paleon¬
tologists have found that prehistoric humans were not brutish troglodytes but
exercised their minds with art, ritual, trade, violence, cooperation, technology,
and symbols." And primatologists have shown that our hairy relatives are not
like lab rats waiting to be conditioned but are outfitted with many complex
faculties that used to be considered uniquely human, including concepts, a
spatial sense, tool use, jealousy, parental love, reciprocity, peacemaking, and
differences between the sexes." With so many mental abilities appearing in all
human cultures, in children before they have acquired culture, and in crea¬
tures that have little or no culture, the mind no longer looks like a formless
lump pounded into shape by culture.

But it is the doctrine of the Noble Savage that has been most mercilessly
debunked by the new evolutionary thinking. A thoroughly noble anything is
an unlikely product of natural selection, because in the competition among
genes for representation in the next generation, noble guys tend to finish last.
Conflicts of interest are ubiquitous among living things, since two animals
cannot both eat the same fish or monopolize the same mate. To the extent that

The Last Wall to Fall / 55

social motives are adaptations that maximize copies of the genes that pro¬
duced them, they should be designed to prevail in such conflicts, and one way
to prevail is to neutralize the competition. As William James put it, just a bit
too flamboyantly, "We, the lineal representatives of the successful enactors of
one scene of slaughter after another, must, whatever more pacific virtues we
may also possess, still carry about with us, ready at any moment to burst into
flame, the smoldering and sinister traits of character by means of which they
lived through so many massacres, harming others, but themselves un¬
harmed."?

From Rousseau to the Thanksgiving editorialist of Chapter I, many intel¬
lectuals have embraced the image ofpeaceable, egalitarian, and ecology-loving
natives. But in the past two decades anthropologists have gathered data on life
and death in pre-state societies rather than accepting the warm and fuzzy
stereotypes. What did they find? In a nutshell: Hobbes was right, Rousseau was
wrong.

To begin with, the stories of tribes out there somewhere who have never
heard of violence turn out to be urban legends. Margaret Mead's descriptions
of peace-loving New Guineans and sexually nonchalant Samoans were based
on perfunctory research and turned out to be almost perversely wrong. As the
anthropologist Derek Freeman later documented, Samoans may beat or kill
their daughters if they are not virgins on their wedding night, a young man
who cannot woo a virgin may rape one to extort her into eloping, and the fam¬
ily of a cuckolded husband may attack and kill the adulterer/" The !Kung San
of the Kalahari Desert had been described by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas as
"the harmless people" in a book with that title. But as soon as anthropologists
camped out long enough to accumulate data, they discovered that the !Kung
San have a murder rate higher than that of American inner cities. They learned
as well that a group of the San had recently avenged a murder by sneaking into
the killer’s group and executing every man, woman, and child as they slept.s?
But at least the !Kung San exist. In the early 1970s the New York Times Maga¬
zine reported the discovery of the "gentle Tasaday" ofthe Philippine rainforest,
a people with no words for conflict, violence, or weapons. The Tasaday turned
out to be local farmers dressed in leaves for a photo opportunity so that
cronies of Ferdinand Marcos could set aside their "homeland" as a preserve
and enjoy exclusive mineral and logging rights."

Anthropologists and historians have also been counting bodies. Many in¬
tellectuals tout the small numbers of battlefield casualties in pre-state societies
as evidence that primitive warfare is largely ritualistic. They do not notice that
two deaths in a band of fifty people is the equivalent of ten million deaths in a
country the size ofthe United States. The archaeologist Lawrence Keeleyhas
summarized the proportion of male deaths caused by war in a number of so¬
cieties for which data are available."

56/The Blank Slate, the Noble Savage, and the Ghost in the Machine

Percentage of male deaths caused by warfare

Iivaro

Yanomamo (Shamatari)

Mae Enga
DugumDani
Murngin
Yanomamo (Namowei)

HuH
Gebusi

US and Europe 20th C.

O 20 40 60

Male deaths (0/0)

The first eight bars, which range from almost 10 percent to almost 60 percent,
come from indigenous peoples in South America and New Guinea. The nearly
invisible bar at the bottom represents the United States and Europe in the
twentieth century and includes the statistics from two world wars. Moreover,
Keeleyand others have noted that native peoples are dead serious when they
carry out warfare. Many of them make weapons as damaging as their technol¬
ogy permits, exterminate their enemies when they can get away with it, and
enhance the experience by torturing captives, cutting off trophies, and feasting
on enemy flesh."

Counting societies instead of bodies leads to equally grim figures. In 1978
the anthropologist Carol Ember calculated that 90 percent of hunter-gatherer
societies are known to engage in warfare, and 64 percent wage war at least once
every two years." Even the 90 percent figure may be an underestimate, because
anthropologists often cannot study a tribe long enough to measure outbreaks
that occur every decade or so (imagine an anthropologist studying the peace¬
ful Europeans between 1918 and 1938). In 1972 another anthropologist, W.T.
Divale, investigated 99 groups of hunter-gatherers from 37 cultures, and
found that 68 were at war at the time, 20 had been at war five to twenty-five
years before, and all the others reported warfare in the more distant past."
Based on these and other ethnographic surveys, Donald Brown includes con¬
flict, rape, revenge, jealousy, dominance, and male coalitional violence as
human universals .75

It is, of course, understandable that people are squeamish about acknowl¬
edging the violence of pre-state societies. For centuries the stereotype of the

The Last Wall to Fall / 57

savage savage was used as a pretext to wipe out indigenous peoples and steal
their lands. But surely it is unnecessary to paint a false picture of a people as
peaceable and ecologically conscientious in order to condemn the great crimes
against them, as if genocide were wrong only when the victims are nice guys.

The prevalence of violence in the kinds of environments in which we
evolved does not mean that our species has a death wish, an innate thirst for
blood, or a territorial imperative. There are good evolutionary reasons for the
members of an intelligent species to try to live in peace. Many computer sim¬
ulations and mathematical models have shown that cooperation pays off in
evolutionary terms as long as the cooperators have brains with the right com¬
bination of cognitive and emotional faculties." Thus while conflict is a human
universal, so is conflict resolution. Together with all their nasty and brutish
motives, all peoples display a host of kinder, gentler ones: a sense of morality,
justice, and community, an ability to anticipate consequences when choosing
how to act, and a love of children, spouses, and friends." Whether a group of
people will engage in violence or work for peace depends on which set of mo¬
tives is engaged, a topic I will pursue at length in later chapters.

Not everyone will be comforted by such reassurances, though, because
they eat away at the third cherished assumption of modern intellectual life.
Love, will, and conscience are in the traditional job description for the soul
and have always been placed in opposition to mere «biological" functions. If
those faculties are «biological" too-that is, evolutionary adaptations imple¬
mented in the circuitry of the brain-then the ghost is left with even less to do
and might as well be pensioned off for good.

58 / The Blank Slate, the Noble Savage, and the Ghost in the Machine

Chapter 4

Culture Vultures

Like all men of Babylon, I have been proconsul; like all, I have been a
slave. Look here-my right hand has no index finger. Look here-
through this gash in my cape you can see on my stomach a crimson tat-
too-it is the second letter, Beth. On nights when the moon is full, this
symbol givesme power over men with the mark of Gimel, but it subjects
me to those with the Aleph, who on nights when there is no moon owe
obedience to those marked with the Gimel. In the half-light of dawn, in
a cellar, standing before a black altar, I have slit the throats of sacred
bulls. Once, for an entire lunar year, I was declared invisible-I would
cry out and no one would heed my call, I would steal bread and not be
beheaded....

lowe that almost monstrous variety to an institution-the Lot-
tery-which is unknown in other nations, or at work in them imper¬
fectly or secretly.'

JORGE LUIS BORGES'S story "The Lottery in Babylon" is perhaps the best de¬
piction of the idea that culture is a set of roles and symbols that mysteriously
descend on passive individuals. His lottery began as the familiar game in
which a winning ticket-was rewarded by ajackpot. But to enhance the suspense
the operators added a few numbers that presented the ticket holder with a fine
rather than a reward. They then imposed prison sentences on those who did
not pay the fines, and the system expanded into a variety of nonmonetary
punishments and rewards. The lottery became free, compulsory, omnipotent,
and increasingly mysterious. People began to speculate on how it worked and
whether it even continued to exist.

At first glance human cultures do appear to have the monstrous variety
of a Borgesian lottery. Members of Homo sapiens ingest everything from
maggots and worms to cow urine and human flesh. They bind, cut, scar, and
stretch body parts in ways that would make the most perforated Western

Culture Vultures / 59

teenager wince. They sanction kinky sexual practices like teenagers receiving
daily fellatio from younger boys and parents arranging marriages between
their five-year-olds. The apparent caprice of cultural variation leads naturally
to the doctrine that culture lives in a separate universe from brains, genes,
and evolution. And this separation depends in turn on the concept of a slate
that is left blank by biology and written upon by culture. Now that I have
tried to convince you that the slate is not blank, it is time to put culture back
into the picture. That will complete the consilience that runs from the life sci¬
ences through the sciences of human nature to the social sciences, humani¬
ties, and arts.

In this chapter I will lay out an alternative to the belief that culture is like
a lottery. Culture can be seen instead as a part of the human phenotype: the
distinctive design that allows us to survive, prosper, and perpetuate our line¬
ages. Humans are a knowledge-using, cooperative species, and culture
emerges naturally from that lifestyle.To preview: The phenomena we call "cul¬
ture" arise as people pool and accumulate their discoveries, and as they insti¬
tute conventions to coordinate their labors and adjudicate their conflicts.
When groups of people separated by time and geography accumulate different
discoveries and conventions, we use the plural and call them cultures. Differ¬
ent cultures, then, don’t come from different kinds of genes-Boas and his
heirs were right about that-but they don't live in a separate world or stamp a
shape onto formless minds either.

THE FIRST STEP in connecting culture to the sciences of human nature is to
recognize that culture, for all its importance, is not some miasma that seeps
into people through their skin. Culture relies on neural circuitry that accom¬
plishes the feat we call learning. Those circuits do not make us indiscriminate
mimics but have to work in surprisingly subtle ways to make the transmission
of culture possible. That is why a focus on innate faculties of mind is not an al¬
ternative to a focus on learning, culture, and socialization, but rather an at¬
tempt to explain how they work.

Take the case of a person’s mother tongue, which is a learned cultural skill
par excellence. A parrot and a child both learn something when exposed to
speech, but only the child has a mental algorithm that extracts words and rules
from the sound wave and uses them to utter and understand an unlimited
number of new sentences. The innate endowment for language is in fact an in¬
nate mechanism for leaminglanguage . 2 In the same way, for children to learn
about culture they cannot be mere video cameras that passively record sights
and sounds. They must be equipped with mental machinery that can extract
the beliefs and values underlying other people's behavior so that the children
themselves can become competent members of the culture.'

Even the humblest act of cultural learning-imitating the behavior of a

(50/The Blank Slate, the Noble Savage, and the Ghost in the Machine

parent or a peer-is more complicated than it looks. To appreciate what goes
on in our minds when we effortlessly learn from other people, we have to
imagine what it would be like to have some other kind of mind. Fortunately,
cognitive scientists have imagined it for us by plumbing the minds of robots,
animals, and people whose minds are impaired.

The artificial intelligence researcher Rodney Brooks, who wants to build a
robot capable of learning by imitation, immediately faced this problem when
he considered using techniques for learning that are common in computer sci¬
ence:

The robot is observing a person opening a glass jar. The person ap¬
proaches the robot and places the jar on a table near the robot. The per¬
son rubs his hands together and then sets himself to removing the lid
from the jar. He grasps the glassjar in one hand and the lid in the other
and begins to unscrew the lid by turning it counter-clockwise. While he
is opening the jar, he pauses to wipe his brow, and glances at the robot to
see what it is doing. He then resumes opening the jar. The robot then at¬
tempts to imitate the action. [But] which parts of the action to be imi¬
tated are important (such as turning the lid counter-clockwise), and
which aren't (such as wiping your brow)? ... How can the robot ab¬
stract the knowledge gained from this experience and apply it to a simi¬
lar situationi"

., not 'V* 1 i'w'ey'

The answer is that the robot has to be equipped with an ability to see into the
mind of the person being imitated, so that it can infer the person's goals and
pick out the aspects of behavior that the person intended to achieve the goal.
Cognitive scientists call this ability intuitive psychology, folk psychology, or a
theory of mind. (The «theory" here refers to the tacit beliefs held by a person,
animal, or robot, not to the explicit beliefs of scientists.) No existing robot
comes closeto having this ability.

Another mind that finds it difficult to infer others' goals is the chim¬
panzee's. The psychologist Laura Petitto was the principal sign language
trainer for the animal known as Nim Chimp sky and lived with him for a year
in a university mansion. At first glance Nim seemed to "imitate" her washing
the dishes, but with an important difference. A dish was not necessarily any
cleaner after Nim rubbed it with a sponge than before, and if he was given a
spotless dish, Nim would «wash" it just as if it were dirty. Nim didn't get the
concept of «washing:' namely using liquid to make something clean. He just
mimicked her rubbing motion while enjoying the sensation of warm water
over his fingers. Many laboratory experiments have shown something similar.
Though chimpanzees and other primates have a reputation as imitators
((Monkey see, monkey do"), their ability to imitate in the way people do-

Culture Vultures / 61

*

L Lli^ vjlvrX4fC I jj I'Ws

replicating another person's intentrather than going through tfie motions-is
rudimentary, because their intuitive psychology is rudimentary. 5

A mind unequipped to discern other people's beliefs and intentions, even
if it can learn in other ways, is incapable of the kind of learning that perpetu¬
ates culture. People with autism suffer from an impairment of this kind. They
can grasp physical representations like maps and diagrams but cannot grasp
mental representations-that is, they cannot read other people’s minds."
Though they certainly imitate, they do it in bizarre ways. Some are prone to
echolalia, repeating other people’s utterances verbatim rather than extracting
^the grammatical patterns that would allow them to compose their own sen¬
tences. Autistics who do learn to speak on their own often use the word you as
if it were their own name, because other people refer to them as you and it
never occurs to them that the word is defined relative to who is addressing it to
whom. If a parent knocks over a glass and says, "Oh.rdamn!" an autistic child
might use oh damn as the word for a glass-disproving the empiricist theory
that normal children can learn words merely by associating sounds and events
that overlap in time. None of this is a consequence oflow intelligence. Autistic
children can be competent (or even savants) when solving other problems,
and retarded children without autism don't show the same foibles with lan¬
guage and imitation. Autism is an innate neurological condition with stron g
genetic roots.' Together with robots and chimpanzees, people with autism re¬
mind us that cultural learning is possible only because neurologically normal
people have innate equipment to accomplish it.

Scientists often interpret the long childhood of members of Homo sapiens
as an adaptation that allows children to acquire the vast store of information
from their culture before striking out on their own as adults. If cultural learn¬
ing depends on special psychological equipment, we should see the equipment
up and running early in childhood. And indeed we do.

Experiments show that one-and-a-half-year-old babies are not associa-
tionists who connect overlapping events indiscriminately. They are intuitive
psychologists who psych out other people’s intentions before copying what

( * they do. When an adult first exposes a baby to a word, as in “That’s a toma " the
baby will remember it as the name of the toy the adult was looking at at the
time, not as the name of the toy the baby herself was looking at." If an adult
fiddles with a gadget but indicates that the action was an accident (by saying
"Whoops!"), a baby will not even bother trying to imitate him. But if the adult
does the same thing but indicates that he intended the action, the baby will im¬
itate him.? And when an adult tries and fails to accomplish something (like
trying to press the button on a buzzer, or trying to string a loop around a peg),
the baby will imitate what the adult tried to do, not what he did do. 10 As some¬
one who studies language acquisition in children, I have continually been
amazed at how early they “get” the logic of language, availing themselves of

62 / The Blank Slate, the Noble Savage, and the Ghost in the Machine

most of the spoken vernacular by the age of three, n That, too, may be an at¬
tempt by the genome to get our culture-acquiring apparatus online as early in
life as the growing brain can handle it.

OUR minds, then, are fitted with mechanisms designed to read the goals of
other people so we can copy their intended acts. But why would we want to?
Though we take it for granted that acquiring culture is a good thing, the act of
acquiring it is often spoken of with scorn. The longshoreman and philosopher
Eric Hoffer wrote, "When people are free to do as they please, they usually im¬
itate each other." And we have a menagerie of metaphors that equate this quin-
tessentially human ability with the behavior of animals: along with monkey
see, monkey do, we have aping, parroting, sheep, lemmings, copycats, and a herd
mentality.

Social psychologists have amply documented that people have a powerful
urge to do as their neighbors do. When unwitting subjects are surrounded by
confederates of the experimenter who have been paid to do something odd,
many or most will go along. They will defy their own eyes and call a long line
"short" or vice versa, nonchalantly fill out a questionnaire as smoke pours out
of a heating vent, or (in a Candid Camera sketch) suddenly strip down to their
underwear for no apparent reason.F But the social psychologists point out
that human conformity, no matter how hilarious it looks in contrived experi¬
ments, has a genuine rationale in social life-indeed, two rationales."

The first is informational, the desire to benefit from other people's knowl¬
edge and judgment. Weary veterans of committees say that the IQ of a group
is the lowest IQ of any member of the group divided by the number of people
in the group, but that is too pessimistic. In a species equipped with language,
an intuitive psychology, and a willingness to cooperate, a group can pool the
hard-won discoveries of members present and past and end up far smarter
than a race of hermits. Hunter-gatherers accumulate the know-how to make
tools, control fire, outsmart prey, and detoxify plants, and can live by this col¬
lective ingenuity even if no member could re-create it all from scratch. Also, by
coordinating their behavior (say, in driving game or taking turns watching
children while others forage), they can act like a big multi-headed, multi-
limbed beast and accomplish feats that a die-hard individualist could not. And
an array of interconnected eyes, ears, and heads is more robust than a single set
with all its shortcomings and idiosyncrasies. There is a Yiddish expression of¬
fered as a reality check to malcontents and conspiracy theorists: The whole
world isn't crazy.

Much of what we call culture is simply accumulated local wisdom: ways of
fashioning artifacts, selecting food, dividing up windfalls, and so on. Some an¬
thropologists, like Marvin Harris, argue that even practices that seem as arbi¬
trary as a lottery may in fact be solutions to ecological problems." Cows really

Culture Vultures / 63

should be sacred in India, he points out; they supply food (milk and butter),
fuel (dung), and power (by pulling plows), so the customs protecting them
thwart the temptation to kill the goose that laid the golden egg. Other cultural
differences may have a rationale in reproduction.1" In some societies, men live
with their paternal families and support their wives and children; in others,
they live with their maternal families and support their sisters and nieces and
nephews. The second arrangement tends to be found in societies where men
have to spend long periods of time away from home and adultery is relatively
common, so they cannot be sure that their wives' children are theirs. Since the
children of a man's mother's daughter have to be his biological kin regardless
of who has been sleeping with whom, a matrilocal family allows men to invest
in children who are guaranteed to carry some of their genes.

Of course, only Procrustes could argue that all cultural practices have a di¬
rect economic or genetic payoff. The second motive for conformity is norma¬
tive, the desire to follow the norms of a community, whatever they are. But
this, too, is not as stupidly lemminglike as it first appears. Many cultural prac¬
tices are arbitrary in their specific form but not in their reason for being. There
is no good reason for people to drive on the right side of the road as opposed
to the left side, or vice versa, but there is every reason for people to drive on the
same side. So an arbitrary choice of which side to drive on, and a widespread
conformity with that choice, make a great deal of sense. Other examples of ar¬
bitrary but coordinated choices, which economists called "cooperative equi¬
libria;' include money, designated days of rest, and the pairings of sound and
meaning that make up the words in a language.

Shared arbitrary practices also help people cope with the fact that while
many things in life are arranged along a continuum, decisions must often be
binary." Children do not become adults instantaneously, nor do dating cou¬
ples become monogamous partners. Rites of passage and their modern equiv¬
alent, pieces of paper like ID cards and marriage licenses, allow third parties to
decide how to treat ambiguous cases-as a child or as an adult, as committed
or as available-without endless haggling over differences of opinion.

And the fuzziest categories of all are other people's intentions. Is he a loyal
member of the coalition (one that I would want to have in my foxhole) or a
quisling who will bailout when times get tough? Does his heart lie with his fa¬
ther’s clan or with his father-in-law's? Is she a suspiciously merry widow or
just getting on with her life?Is he dissing me or just in a hurry? Initiation rites,
tribal badges, prescribed periods of mourning, and ritualized forms of address
may not answer these questions definitively, but they can remove clouds of
suspicion that would otherwise hang over people's heads.

When conventions are widely enough entrenched, they can become a kind
of reality even though they exist only in people's minds. In his book The Con¬
struction of Social Reality (not to be confused with the social construction of

64/The Blank Slate, the Noble Savage, and the Ghost in the Machine

reality), the philosopher John Searle points out that certain facts are objec¬
tively true just because people act as if they are true, i? For example, it is a mat¬
ter of fact, not opinion, that George W. Bush is the forty-third president of the
United States, that O.}. Simpson was found not guilty of murder, that the
Boston Celtics won the NBA World Championship in 1986, and that a Big Mac
(at the time of this writing) costs $2.62. But though these are objective facts,
they are not facts about the physical world, like the atomic number of cad¬
mium or the classification of a whale as a mammal. They consist in a shared
understanding in the minds of most members in a community, usually agree¬
ments to grant (or deny) power or status to certain other people.

Life in complex societies is built on social realities, the most obvious ex¬
amples being money and the rule of law. But a social fact depends entirely on
the willingness of people to treat it as a fact. It is specific to a community, as we
see when people refuse to honor a foreign currency or fail to recognize the sov¬
ereignty of a self-proclaimed leader. And it can dissolve with changes in the
collective psychology, as when a currency becomes worthless through hyper¬
inflation or a regime collapses because people defy the police and army en
masse. (Searle points out that Mao was only half right when he said that ((po¬
litical power grows out of the barrel of a gun." Since no regime can keep a gun
trained on every last citizen, political power grows out of a regime's ability to
command the fear of enough people at the same time.) Social reality exists
only within a group of people, but it depends on a cognitive ability present in
each individual: the ability to understand a public agreement to confer power
or status, and to honor it as long as other people do.

How does a psychological event-an invention, an affectation, a decision
to treat a certain kind of person in a certain way-turn into a sociocultural
fact-a tradition, a custom, an ethos, a way oflife? We should understand cul¬
ture, according to the cognitive anthropologist Dan Sperber, as the epidemiol¬
ogy of mental representations: the spread of ideas and practices from person to
person." Many scientists now use the mathematical tools of epidemiology
(how diseases spread) or of population biology (how genes and organisms
spread) to model the evolution of culture. 19 They have shown how a tendency
of people to adopt the innovations of other people can lead to effects that we
understand using metaphors like epidemics, wildfire, snowballs, and tipping
points. Individual psychology turns into collective culture.

CULTURE, THEN, is a pool of technological and social innovations that peo¬
ple accumulate to help them live their lives, not a collection of arbitrary roles
and symbols that happen to befall them. This idea helps explain what makes
cultures different and similar. When a splinter group leaves the tribe and is cut
off by an ocean, a mountain range, or a demilitarized zone, an innovation on
one side of the barrier has no way of diffusing to the other side. As each group

Culture Vultures / 65

modifies its own collection of discoveries and conventions, the collections will
diverge and the groups will have different cultures. Even when two groups stay
within shouting distance, if their relationship has an edge of hostility they may
adopt behavioral identity badges that advertise which side someone is on, fur¬
ther exaggerating any differences. This branching and differentiation is easily
visible in the evolution of languages, perhaps the clearest example of cultural
evolution. And as Darwin pointed out, it has a close parallel in the origin of
species, which often arise when a population splits in two and the groups of
descendants evolve in different directions." As with languages and species,
cultures that split apart more recently tend to be more similar. The traditional
cultures of Italy and France, for example, are more similar to each other than
either is to the cultures of the Maoris and Hawaiians.

The psychological roots of culture also help explain why some bits of cul¬
ture change and others stay put. Some collective practices have enormous in¬
ertia because they impose a high cost on the first individual who would try to
change them. A switch from driving on the left to driving on the right could not
begin with a daring nonconformist or a grass-roots movement but would have
to be imposed from the top down (which is what happened in Sweden at 5 a m.,
Sunday, September 3, 1967). Other examples are laying down your weapons
when hostile neighbors are armed to the teeth, abandoning the QWERTY key¬
board layout, and pointing out that the emperor is not wearing any clothes.

But traditional cultures can change, too, and more dramatically than most
people realize. Preserving cultural diversity is considered a supreme virtue
today, but the members of the diverse cultures don't always see it that way. Peo¬
ple have wants and needs, and when cultures rub shoulders, people in one cul¬
ture are bound to notice when their neighbors are satisfying those desires
better than they are. When they do notice, history tells us, they shamelessly
borrow whatever works best. Far from being self-preserving monoliths, cul¬
tures are porous and constantly in flux. Language, once again, is a clear exam¬
ple. Notwithstanding the perennial lamentations of purists and the sanctions
of language academies, no language is ever spoken the way it was centuries be¬
fore. Just compare contemporary English with the language of Shakespeare, or
the language of Shakespeare with the language of Chaucer. Many other "tradi¬
tional" practices are surprisingly recent. The ancestors of the Hasidic Jews did
not wear black coats and fur-lined hats in Levantine deserts, nor did the Plains
Indians ride horses before the arrival of the Europeans. National cuisines, too,
have shallow roots. Potatoes in Ireland, paprika in Hungary, tomatoes in Italy,
hot chile peppers in India and China, and cassava in Africa come from New
World plants, and were brought to their "traditional" homes in the centuries
after the arrival of Columbus in the Americas."

The idea that a culture is a tool for living can even explain the fact that first
led Boas to argue the opposite, that a culture is an autonomous system of

66/The Blank Slate, the Noble Savage, and the Ghost in the Machine

ideas. The most obvious cultural difference on the planet is that some cultures
are materially more successful than others. In past centuries, cultures from Eu¬
rope and Asia decimated the cultures of Africa, the Americas, Australia, and
the Pacific. Even within Europe and Asia the fortunes of cultures have varied
widely, some developing expansive civilizations rich in art, science, and tech¬
nology, others stuck in poverty and helpless to resist conquest. What allowed
small groups of Spaniards to cross the Atlantic and defeat the great empires of
the Incas and Aztecs, rather than the other way around? Why didn't African
tribes colonize Europe instead of vice versa? The immediate answer is that the
wealthy conquerors had better technology and a more complex political and
economic organization. But that simply pushes back the question ofwhy some
cultures develop more complex ways of life than others.

Boas helped overthrow the bad racial science of the nineteenth century
that attributed these disparities to differences in how far each race had biolog¬
ically evolved. In its place his successors stipulated that behavior is determined
by culture and that culture is autonomous from biology." Unfortunately, that
left the dramatic differences among cultures unexplained, as if they were ran¬
dom outcomes of the lottery in Babylon. Indeed, the differences were not just
unexplained but unmentionable, out of a fear that people would misinterpret
the observation that some cultures were more technologically sophisticated
than others as some kind of moral judgment that advanced societies were bet¬
ter than primitive ones. But no one can fail to notice that some cultures can ac¬
complish things that all people want (like health and comfort) better than
others. The dogma that cultures vary capriciously is a feeble refutation of any
private opinion that some races have what it takes to develop science, technol¬
ogy, and government and others don't.

But recently two scholars, working independently, have decisively shown
that there is no need to invoke race to explain differences among cultures. Both
arrived at that conclusion by eschewing the Standard Social Science Model, in
which cultures are arbitrary symbol systems that exist apart from the minds of
individual people. In his trilogy Race and Culture, Migrations and Cultures,
and Conquests and Cultures, the economist Thomas Sowell explained his start¬
ing point for an analysis of cultural differences:

A culture is not a symbolic pattern, preserved like a butterfly in amber.

Its place is not in a museum but in the practical activities of daily life,
where it evolves under the stress of competing goals and other compet¬
ing cultures. Cultures do not exist as simply static "differences "to be cel¬
ebrated but compete with one another as better and worse ways of
getting things done-better and worse, not from the standpoint of some
observer, but from the standpoint of the peoples themselves, as they
cope and aspire amid the gritty realities of life."

Culture Vultures / 67

The physiologist Jared Diamond is a proponent of ideas in evolutionary
psychology and of consilience between the sciences and the humanities, par¬
ticularly history" In Guns, Germs, and Steel he rejected the standard assump¬
tion that history is just one damn thing after another and tried to explain the
sweep of human history over tens of thousands of years in the context of
human evolution and ecology," Sowell and Diamond have made an authori¬
tative case that the fates of human societies come neither from chance nor
from race but from the human drive to adopt the innovations of others, com¬
bined with the vicissitudes of geography and ecology.

Diamond begins at the beginning. For most of human evolutionary his¬
tory we lived as hunter-gatherers. The trappings of civilization-sedentary liv¬
ing, cities, a division of labor, government, professional armies, writing,
metallurgy-sprang from a recent development, farming, about ten thousand
years ago. Farming depends on plants and animals that can be tamed and ex¬
ploited, and only a few species are suited to it. They happened to be concen¬
trated in a few parts of the world, including the Fertile Crescent, China, and
Central and South America. The first civilizations arose in those regions.

From then on, geography was destiny. Diamond and Sowell point out that
Eurasia, the world's largest landmass, is an enormous catchment area for local
innovations. Traders, sojourners, and conquerors can collect them and spread
them, and people living at the crossroads can concentrate them into a high-
tech package. Also, Eurasia runs in an east-west direction, whereas Africa and
the Americas run north-south. Crops and animals that are domesticated in
one region can easily be spread to others along lines of latitude, which are also
lines of similar climate. But they cannot be spread as easily along lines of lon¬
gitude, where a few hundred miles can spell the difference between temperate
and tropical climates. Horses domesticated in the Asian steppes, for example,
could make their way westward to Europe and eastward to China, but llamas
and alpacas domesticated in the Andes never made it northward to Mexico, so
the Mayan and Aztec civilizations were left without pack animals. And until
recently the transportation of heavy goods over long distances (and with them
traders and their ideas) was possible only by water. Europe and parts of Asia
are blessed by a notchy, furrowed geography with many natural harbors and
navigable rivers. Africa and Australia are not.

So Eurasia conquered the world not because Eurasians are smarter but be¬
cause they could best take advantage of the principle that many heads are bet¬
ter than one. The "culture" of any of the conquering nations of Europe, such as
Britain, is in fact a greatest-hits collection of inventions assembled across
thousands of miles and years. The collection is made up of cereal crops and al¬
phabetic writing from the Middle East, gunpowder and paper from China, do¬
mesticated horses from Ukraine, and many others. But the necessarily insular
cultures of Australia, Africa, and the Americas had to make do with a few

68/The Blank Slate, the Noble Savage, and the Ghost in the Machine

homegrown technologies, and as a result they were no match for their plural¬
istic conquerors. Even within Eurasia and (later) the Americas, cultures that
were isolated by mountainous geography-for example, in the Appalachians,
the Balkans, and the Scottish highlands-remained backward for centuries in
comparison with the vast network of people around them.

The extreme case, Diamond points out, is Tasmania. The Tasmanians,
who were nearly exterminated by Europeans in the nineteenth century, were
the most technologically primitive people in recorded history. Unlike the Ab¬
origines on the Australian mainland, the Tasmanians had no way of making
fire, no boomerangs or spear throwers, no specialized stone tools, no axes with
handles, no canoes, no sewing needles, and no ability to fish. Amazingly, the
archaeological record shows that their ancestors from the Australian mainland
had arrived with these technologies ten thousand years before. But then the
land bridge connecting Tasmania to the mainland was submerged and the is¬
land was cut off from the rest of the world. Diamond speculates that any tech¬
nology can be lost from a culture at some point in its history. Perhaps a raw
material came to be in short supply and people stopped making the products
that depended on it. Perhaps all the skilled artisans in a generation were killed
by a freak storm. Perhaps some prehistoric Luddite or ayatollah imposed a
taboo on the practice for one inane reason or another. Whenever this happens
in a culture that rubs up against other ones, the lost technology can eventually
be reacquired as the people clamor for the higher standard ofliving enjoyed by
their neighbors. But in lonely Tasmania, people would have had to reinvent the
proverbial wheel every time it was lost, and so their standard of living ratch¬
eted downward.

The ultimate irony of the Standard Social Science Model is that it failed to
accomplish the very goal that brought it into being: explaining the different
fortunes of human societies without invoking race. The best explanation
today is thoroughly cultural, but it depends on seeing a culture as a product of
human desires rather than as a shaper of them.

history and culture, then, can be grounded in psychology, which can be
grounded in computation, neuroscience, genetics, and evolution. But this
kind of talk sets off alarms in the minds of many nonscientists. They fear that
consilience is a smokescreen for a hostile takeover of the humanities, arts, and
social sciences by philistines in white coats. The richness of their subject mat¬
ter would be dumbed down into a generic palaver about neurons, genes,and
evolutionary urges. This scenario is often called «reductionism;' and I will
conclude the chapter by showing why consilience does not call for it.

Reductionism, like cholesterol, comes in good and bad forms. Bad reduc-
tionism-also called «greedy reductionism" or «destructive reductionism"-
consists of trying to explain a phenomenon in terms of its smallest or simplest

Culture Vultures / 69

constituents. Greedy reductionism is not a straw man. I know several scientists
who believe (or at least say to granting, agencies) that we will make break¬
throughs in education, conflict resolution, and other social concerns by study¬
ing the biophysics of neural membranes or the molecular structure of the
synapse. But greedy reductionism is far from the majority view, and it is easy
to show why it is wrong. As the philosopher Hilary Putnam has pointed out,
even the simple fact that a square peg won't fit into a round hole cannot be ex¬
plained in terms of molecules and atoms but only at a higher level of analysis
involving rigidity (regardless of what makes the peg rigid) and geometry."
And if anyone really thought that sociology or literature or history could be re¬
placed by biology, why stop there? Biology could in turn be ground up into
chemistry, and chemistry into physics, leaving one struggling to explain the
causes of World War I in terms of electrons and quarks. Even if World War I
consisted of nothing but a very, very large number of quarks in a very, very
complicated pattern of motion, no insight is gained by describing it that way.

Good reductionism (also called hierarchical reductionism) consists not of
replacing one field of knowledge with another but of connecting or unifying
them. The building blocks used by one field are put under a microscope by an¬
other. The black boxes get opened; the promissory notes get cashed. A geogra¬
pher might explain why the coastline of Africa fits into the coastline of the
Americas by saying that the landmasses were once adjacent but sat on differ¬
ent plates, which drifted apart. The question of why the plates move gets
passed on to the geologists, who appeal to an upwelling of magma that pushes
them apart. As for how the magma, got so hot, they call in the physicists to ex¬
plain the reactions in the Earth's core and mantle. None of the scientists is dis¬
pensable. An isolated geographer would have to invoke magic to move the
continents, and an isolated physicist could not have predicted the shape of
South America.

So, too, for the bridge between biology and culture. The big thinkers in the
sciences of human nature have been adamant that mental life has to be under¬
stood at several levels of analysis, not just the lowest one. The linguist Noam
Chomsky, the computational neuroscientist David Marr, and the ethologist
Niko Tinbergen have independently marked out a set of levels of analysis for
understanding a faculty of the mind. These levels include its function (what it
accomplishes in an ultimate, evolutionary sense); its real-time operation (how
it works proximately, from moment to moment); how it is implemented in
neural tissue; how it develops in the individual; and how it evolved in the
species." For example, language is based on a combinatorial grammar de¬
signed to communicate an unlimited number of thoughts. It is utilized by
people in real time via an interplay of memory lookup and rule application. It
is implemented in a network of regions in the center of the left cerebral hemi¬
sphere that must coordinate memory, planning, word meaning, and grammar.

70/The Blank Slate, the Noble Savage, and the Ghost in the Machine

It develops in the first three years of life in a sequence from babbling to words
to word combinations, including errors in which rules may be overapplied. It
evolved through modifications of a vocal tract and brain circuitry that had
other uses in earlier primates, because the modifications allowed our ancestors
to prosper in a socially interconnected, knowledge-rich lifestyle. None of these
levels can be replaced by any ofthe others, but none can be fully understood in
isolation from the others.

Chomsky distinguishes all of these from yet another level of analysis (one
that he himself has little use for but that other language scholars invoke). The
vantage points I just mentioned treat language as an internal, individual en¬
tity, such as the knowledge of Canadian English that I possess in my head. But
language can also be understood as an external entity: the "English language"
as a whole, with its fifteen-hundred-year history, its countless dialects and hy¬
brids spanning the globe, its half a million words in the OxfordEnglish Dictio¬
nary. An external language is an abstraction that pools the internal languages
of hundreds of millions of people living in different places and times. It could
not exist without the internal languages in the minds of real humans con¬
versing with one another, but it cannot be reduced to what any of them knows
either. For example, the statement "English has a larger vocabulary than
Japanese" could be true even if no English speaker has a larger vocabulary than
anyJapanesespeakeL

The English language was shaped by broad historical events that did not
take place inside a single head. They include the Scandinavian and Norman in¬
vasions in medieval times, which infected it with non-Anglo-Saxon words; the
Great Vowel Shift ofthe fifteenth century, which scrambled the pronunciation
of the long vowels and left its spelling system an irregular mess; the expansion
of the British Empire, which budded off a variety of Englishes (American,
Australian, Singaporean); and the development of global electronic media,
which may rehomogenize the language as we all read the same web pages and
watch the same television shows.

At the same time, none of these forces can be understood without taking
into account the thought processes of flesh-and-blood people. They include
the Britons who reanalyzed French words when they absorbed them into En¬
glish' the children who failed to remember irregular past-tense forms like
writhe-wrothe and crow-crew and converted them into regular verbs, the aris¬
tocrats who affected fussy pronunciations to differentiate themselves from the
rabble, the mumblers who swallowed consonants to leave us made and had
(originally maked and haved) , and the clever speakers who first converted Ihad
the house built to / had built the house and inadvertently gave English its per¬
fect tense. Language is re-created every generation as it passes through the
minds of the humans who speak it. 28

External language is, of course, a fine example of culture, the province of

Culture Vultures / 71

social scientists and scholars in the humanities. The way that language can be
understood at some half-dozen connected levels of analysis, from the brain
and evolution to the cognitive processes of individuals to vast cultural systems,
shows how culture and biology may be connected. The possibilities for con¬
nections in other spheres of human knowledge are plentiful, and we will en¬
counter them throughout the book. The moral sense can illuminate legal and
ethical codes. The psychology of kinship helps us understand sociopolitical
arrangements. The mentality of aggression helps to make sense of war and
conflict resolution. Sex differences are relevant to gender politics. Human aes¬
thetics and emotion can enlighten our understanding of the arts.

What is the payoff for connecting the social and cultural levels of analysis
to the psychological and biological ones? It is the thrill of discoveries that
could never be made within the boundaries of a single discipline, such as uni¬
versal of beauty, the logic of language, and the components of the moral
sense. And it is the uniquely satisfying understanding we have enjoyed from
the unification of the other sciences-the explanation of muscles as tiny mag¬
netic ratchets, of flowers as lures for insects, of the rainbow as a splaying of
wavelengths that ordinarily blend into white. It is the difference between
stamp collecting and detective work, between slinging around jargon and of¬
fering insight, between saying that something just is and explaining why it had'
to be that way as opposed to some other way it could have been. In a talk-show
parody in Monty Python's Flying Circus, an expert on dinosaurs trumpets her
new theory of the brontosaurus: “All brontosauruses are thin at one end;
much, much thicker in the middle; and then thin again at the far end." We
laugh because she has not explained her subject in terms of deeper princi-
ples-she has not "reduced" it, in the good sense. Even the word understand-
literally, «stand under"-alludes to descending to a deeper level of analysis.

Our understanding oflife has only been enriched by the discovery that liv¬
ing flesh is composed of molecular clockwork rather than quivering proto¬
plasm, or that birds soar by exploiting the laws of physics rather than defying
them. In the same way, our understanding of ourselves and our cultures can
only be enriched by the discovery that our minds are composed of intricate
neural circuits for thinking, feeling, and learning rather than blank slates,
amorphous blobs, or inscrutable ghosts.

7 2/ The Blank Slate, the Noble Savage, and the Ghost in the Machine

Chapter 5

The Slate's Last Stand

human nature is a scientific topic, and as new facts come in, our concep¬
tion of it will change. Sometimes the facts may show that a theory grants our
minds too much innate structure. For example, perhaps our language faculties
are equipped not with nouns, verbs, adjectives, and prepositions but only with
a distinction between more nounlike and more verblike parts of speech. At
other times a theory may turn out to have granted our minds too little innate
structure. No current theory of personality can explain why both members of
a pair of identical twins reared apart liked to keep rubber bands around their
wrists and pretend to sneeze in crowded elevators.

Also up for grabs is exactly how our minds use the information coming in
from the senses. Once our faculties for language and social interaction are up
and running, some kinds of learning may consist of simply recording infor¬
mation for future use, like the name of a person or the content of a new piece
of legislation. Others may be more like setting a dial, flipping a switch, or com¬
puting an average, where the apparatus is in place but a parameter is left open
so the mind can track variation in the local environment. Still others may use
the information provided by all normal environments, such as the presence of
gravity or the statistics of colors and lines in the visual field, to tune up our
sensorimotor systems. There are yet other ways that nature and nurture might
interact, and many will blur the distinction between the two.

This book is based on the estimation that whatever the exact picture turns
out to be, a universal complex human nature will be part of it. I think we have
reason to believe that the mind is equipped with a battery of emotions, drives,
and faculties for reasoning and communicating, and that they have a common
logic across cultures, are difficult to erase or redesign from scratch, were
shaped by natural selection acting over the course of human evolution, and
owe some of their basic design (and some of their variation) to information in
the genome. This general picture is meant to embrace a variety of theories,
present and future, and a range of foreseeable scientific discoveries.

The Slate's Last Stand / 73

But the picture does not embrace just any theory or discovery. Conceiv¬
ably scientists might discover that there is insufficient information in the
genome to specify any innate circuitry, or no known mechanism by which it
could be wired into the brain. Or perhaps they will discover that brains are
made out of general-purpose stuff that can soak up just about any pattern in
the sensory input and organize itself to accomplish just about any goal. The
former discovery would make innate organization impossible; the latter
would make it unnecessary. Those discoveries would call into question the
very concept of human nature. Unlike the moral and political objections to the
concept of human nature (objections that I discuss in the rest of this book),
these would be scientific objections. If such discoveries are on the horizon, I
had better look at them carefully.

This chapter is about three scientific developments that are sometimes in¬
terpreted as undermining the possibility of a complex human nature. The first
comes from the Human Genome Project. When the sequence of the human
genome was published in 2001, geneticists were surprised that the number of
genes was lower than they had predicted. The estimates hovered around
34,000 genes, which lies well outside the earlier range of 50,000 to 100,000.'
Some editorialists concluded that the smaller gene count refuted any claim
about innate talents or tendencies, because the slate is too small to contain
much writing. Some even saw it as vindicating the concept of free will: the
smaller the machine, the more room for a ghost.

The second challenge comes from the use of computer models of neural
networks to explain cognitive processes. These artificial neural networks can
often be quite good at learning statistical patterns in their input. Some model¬
ers from the school of cognitive science called connectionism suggest that
generic neural networks can account for all of human cognition, with little or
no innate tailoring for particular faculties such as social reasoning or lan¬
guage. In Chapter 2 we met the founders of connectionism, David Rumelhart
and James McClelland, who suggested that people are smarter than rats only
because they have more associative cortex and because their environment con¬
tains a culture to organize it.

The third comes from the study of neural plasticity, which examines how
the brain develops in the womb and early childhood and how it records expe¬
rience as the animal learns. Neuroscientists have recently shown how the brain
changes in response to learning, practice, and input from the senses. One spin
on these discoveries may be called extreme plasticity. According to this slant,
the cerebral cortex-the convoluted gray matter responsible for perception,
thinking, language, and memory-is a protean substance that can be shaped
almost limitlessly by the structure and demands of the environment. The
blank slate becomes the plastic slate.

Connectionism and extreme plasticity are popular among cognitive sci-

74/The Blank Slate, the Noble Savage, and the Ghost in the Machine

entists at the West Pole, who reject a completely blank slate but want to restrict
innate organization to simple biases in attention and memory. Extreme plas¬
ticity also appeals to neuroscientists who wish to boost the importance of their
field for education and social policy, and to entrepreneurs selling products to
speed up infant development, cure learning disabilities, or slow down aging.
Outside the sciences, all three developments have been welcomed , by some
scholars in the humanities who want to beat back the encroachments of biol¬
ogy.! The lean genome, connectionism, and extreme plasticity are the Blank
Slate's last stand.

The point of this chapter is that these claims are not vindications of the
doctrine of the Blank Slate but products of the BlankSlate. Many people (in¬
cluding a few scientists) have selectively read the evidence, sometimes in
bizarre ways, to fit with a prior belief that the mind cannot possibly have any
innate structure, or with simplistic notions of how innate structure, if it did
exist, would be encoded in the genes and develop in the brain.

I should say at the outset that I find these latest-and-best blank-slate the¬
ories highly implausible-indeed, barely coherent. Nothing comes out of
nothing, and the complexity of the brain has to corne from somewhere. It can¬
not corne from the environment alone, because the whole point of having a
brain is to accomplish certain goals, and the environment has no idea what
those goals are. A given environment can accommodate organisms that build
darns, migrate by the stars, trill and twitter to impress the females, scent-mark
trees, write sonnets, and so on. To one species, a snatch of human speech is a
warning to flee; to another, it is an interesting new sound to incorporate into
its own vocal repertoire; to a third, it is grist for grammatical analysis. Infor¬
mation in the world doesn't tell you what to do with it.

Also, brain tissue is not some genie that can grant its owner any power that
would corne in handy. It is a physical mechanism, an arrangement of matter
that converts inputs to outputs in particular ways. The idea that a single
generic substance can see in depth, control the hands, attract a mate, bring up
children, elude predators, outsmart prey, and so on, without some degree of
specialization, is not credible. Saying that the brain solves these problems be¬
cause of its "plasticity" is not much better than saying it solves them by magic.

Still, in this chapter I will examine the latest scientific objections to human
nature carefully. Each of the discoveries is important on its own terms, even if
it does not support the extravagant conclusions that have been drawn. And
once the last supports for the Blank Slate have been evaluated, I can properly
sum up the scientific case for the alternative.

THE HUMAN GENOME is often seen as the essence of our species, so it is not
surprising that when its sequence was announced in 2001 commentators
rushed to give it the correct interpretation for human affairs. Craig Venter,

The Slate's Last Stand / 75

whose company had competed with a public consortium in the race to se¬
quence the genome, said at a press conference that the smaller-than-expected
gene count shows that "we simply do not have enough genes for this idea ofbi-
ological determinism to be right. The wonderful diversity ofthe human species
is not hard-wired in our genetic code. Our environments are critical." In the
United Kingdom, The Guardian headlined its story, "Revealed: The Secret of
Human Behaviour. Environment, Not Genes, Key to Our Acts."} An editorial in
another British newspaper concluded that “we are more free, it seems, than we
had realized." Moreover, the finding "offers comfort for the left, with its belief
in the potential of all, however deprived their background. But it is damning
for the right, with its fondness for ruling classes and original sin,""

All this from the number 34,000! Which leads to the question, What num¬
ber of genes would have proven that the diversity of our species was wired into
our genetic code, or that we are less free than we had realized, or that the po¬
litical right is right and the left is wrong? 50,000? 150,000? Conversely, if it
turned out that we had only 20,000 genes, would that have made us even freer,
or the environment even more important, or the political left even more
comfortable? The fact is that no one knows what these numbers mean. No
one has the slightest idea how many genes it would take to build a system of
hard-wired modules, or a general-purpose learning program, or anything in
between-to say nothing of original sin or the superiority of the ruling class.
In our current state of ignorance of how the genes build a brain, the number
of genes in the human genome is just a number.

If you don't believe this, consider the roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans,
which has about 18,000 genes. By the logic of the genome editorialists, it
should be twice as free, be twice as diverse, and have twice as much potential as
a human being. In fact, it is a microscopic worm composed of959 cells grown
by a rigid genetic program, with a nervous system consisting of exactly 302
neurons in a fixed wiring diagram. As far as behavior is concerned, it eats,
mates, approaches and avoids certain smells, and that's about it. This alone
should make it obvious that our freedom and diversity of behavior come from
having a complex biological makeup, not a simple one.

Now, it is a genuine puzzle why humans, with their hundred trillion cells
and hundred billion neurons, need only twice as many genes as a humble little
worm. Many biologists believe that the human genes have been undercounted.
The number of genes in a genome can only be estimated; right now they can¬
not literally be totted up. Gene-estimating programs look for sequences in the
DNA that are similar to known genes and that are active enough to be caught
in the act of building a protein." Genes that are unique to humans or active
only in the developing brain ofthe fetus-the genes most relevant to human
nature-and other inconspicuous genes could evade the software and get left

76/The Blank Slate, the Noble Savage, and the Ghost in the Machine

out of the estimates. Alternative estimates of 57,000,75,000, and even 120,000
human genes are currently being bruited about." Still, even if humans had six
times as many genes as a roundworm rather than just twice as many, the puz¬
zle would remain.

Most biologists who are pondering the puzzle don’t conclude that hu¬
mans are less complex than we thought. Instead they conclude that the num¬
ber of genes in a genome has little to do with the complexity of the organism.'
A single gene does not correspond to a single component in such a way that an
organism with 20,000 genes has 20,000 components, an organism with 30,000
genes has 30,000 components, and so on. Genes specify proteins, and some of
the proteins do become the meat and juices of an organism. But other proteins
turn genes on or off, speed up or slow down their activity, or cut and splice
other proteins into new combinations. James Watson points out that we
should recalibrate our intuitions about what a given number of genes can do:
"Imagine watching a play with thirty thousand actors. You'd get pretty con¬
fused."

Depending on how the genes interact, the assembly process can be much
more intricate for one organism than for another with the same number of
genes. In a simple organism, many of the genes simply build a protein and
dump it into the stew. In a complex organism, one gene may turn on a second
one, which speeds up the activity of a third one (but only if a fourth one is ac¬
tive) , which then turns off the original gene (but only if a fifth one is inactive),
and so on. This defines a kind of recipe that can build a more complex organ¬
ism out of the same number of genes. The complexity of an organism thus de¬
pends not just on its gene count but on the intricacy of the box-and-arrow
diagram that captures how each gene impinges on the activity of the other
genes."And because adding a gene doesn't just add an ingredient but can mul¬
tiply the number of ways that the genes can interact with one another, the
complexity of organisms depends on the number of possible combinations of
active and inactive genes in their genomes. The geneticist Jean-Michel Claverie
suggests that it might be estimated by the number two (active versus inactive)
raised to the power ofthe number ofgenes. By that measure, a human genome
is not twice as complex as a roundworm genome but 2 16 ,ooo (a one followed by
4,800 zeroes) times as complex."

There are two other reasons why the complexity of the genome is not re¬
flected in the number of genes it contains. One is that a given gene can pro¬
duce not just one protein but several. A gene is typically broken into stretches
ofDNA that code for fragments of protein (exons) separated by stretches of
DNA that don't (introns), a bit like a magazine article interrupted by ads. The
segments of a gene can then be spliced together in multiple ways. A gene com¬
posed of exons A, B, C, and D might give rise to proteins corresponding to

The Slate's Last Stand / 77

ABC, ABD, ACD, and so on-as many as ten different proteins per gene. This
happens to a greater degree in complex organisms than in simple ones.'?

Second, the 34,000 genes take up only about 3 percent of the human
genome. The rest consists of DNA that does not code for protein and that used
to be dismissed as “junk.” But as one biologist recently put it, "The term 'junk
DNA' is a reflection of our ignorance,"!' The size, placement, and content of
the noncoding DNA can have dramatic effects on the way that nearby genes
are activated to make proteins. Information in the billions of bases in the non¬
coding regions of the genome is part of the specification of a human being,
above and beyond the information contained in the 34,000 genes.

The human genome, then, is fully capable ofbuilding a complex brain, in
spite of the bizarre proclamations of how wonderful it is that people are al¬
most as simple as worms. Of course "the wonderful diversity of the human
species is not hard-wired in our genetic code," but we didn't need to count
genes to figure that out-we already know it from the fact that a child growing
up in Japan speaks Japanese but the same child growing up in England would
speak English. It is an example of a syndrome we will meet elsewhere in this
book: scientific findings spin-doctored beyond recognition to make a moral
point that could have been made more easily on other grounds.

THE SECOND SCIENTIFIC defense of the Blank Slate comes from connection-
ism, the theory that the brain is like the artificial neural networks simulated on
computers to learn statistical patterns. 12

Cognitive scientists agree that the elementary processes that make up the
instruction set ofthe brain-storing and retrieving an association, sequencing
elements, focusing attention-are implemented in the brain as networks of
densely interconnected neurons (brain cells). The question is whether a
generic kind of network, after being shaped by the environment, can explain
all of human psychology, or whether the genome tailors different networks
to the demands of particular domains: language, vision, morality, fear, lust,
intuitive psychology, and so on. The connectionists, of course, do not believe
in a blank slate, but they do believe in the closest mechanistic equivalent, a
general-purpose learning device.

What is a neural network? Connectionists use the term to refer not to real
neural circuitry in the brain but to a kind of computer program based on the
metaphor of neurons and neural circuits. In the most common approach, a
"neuron" carries information by being more or less active. The activity level in¬
dicates the presence or absence (or intensity or degree of confidence) of a sim¬
ple feature of the world. The feature may be a color, a line with a certain slant,
a letter ofthe alphabet, or a property of an animal such as having four legs.

A network of neurons can represent different concepts, depending on

78/The Blank Slate, the Noble Savage, and the Ghost in the Machine

which ones are active. If neurons for "yellow: 1 "flies:' and "sings» are active, the
network is thinking about a canary; if neurons for "silver: 1 "flies: 1 and "roars"
are active, it is thinking about an airplane. An artificial neural network com¬
putes in the following manner. Neurons are linked to other neurons by con¬
nections that work something like synapses. Each neuron counts up the inputs
from other neurons and changes its activity level in response. The network
learns by allowing the input to change the strengths of the connections. The
strength of a connection determines the likelihood that the input neuron will
excite or inhibit the output neuron.

Depending on what the neurons stand for, how they are innately wired,
and how the connections change with training, a connectionist network can
learn to compute various things. If everything is connected to everything else,
a network can soak up the correlations among features in a set of objects. For
example, after exposure to descriptions of many birds it can predict that feath¬
ered singing things tend to fly or that feathered flying things tend to sing or
that singing flying things tend to have feathers. If a network has an input layer
connected to an output layer, it can learn associations between ideas, such as
that small soft flying things are animals but large metallic flying things are ve¬
hicles. If its output layer feeds back to earlier layers, it can crank out ordered
sequences, such as the sounds making up a word.

The appeal of neural networks is that they automatically generalize their
training to similar new items. If a network has been trained that tigers eat
Frosted Flakes, it will tend to generalize that lions eat Frosted Flakes, because
"eating Frosted Flakes" has been associated not with "tigers" but with simpler
features like "roars" and "has whiskers:' which make up part ofthe representa¬
tion of lions, too. The school ofconnectionism, like the school of association-
ism championed, by Focke, Hume, and Mill) asserts that these generalizations
are the crux of intelligence. If so, highly trained but otherwise generic neural
networks can explain intelligence:

Computer modelers often set their models on simplified toy problems to
prove that they can work in principle. The question then becomes whether the
models can "scale up" to more realistic problems, or whether) as skeptics say,
the modeler «is climbing trees to get to the moon," Here we have the problem
with connectionism. Simple connectionist networks can manage impressive
displays of memory and generalization incircumscribed problems like read¬
ing a list of words or learning stereotypes of animals. But they are simply too
underpowered to duplicate more realistic feats of human intelligence like un¬
derstanding a sentence or reasoning about living things.

Humans don't just loosely associate things that resemble each other, or
things that tend to occur together. They have combinatorial minds that enter¬
tain propositions about what is true of what, and about who did what to

The Slate's Last Stand / 79

whom, when and where and why. And that requires a computational architec¬
ture that is more sophisticated than the uniform tangle of neurons used in
generic connectionist networks. It requires an architecture equipped with log¬
ical apparatus like rules, variables, propositions, goal states, and different kinds
of data structures, organized into larger systems. Many cognitive scientists have
made this point, including Gary Marcus, Marvin Minsky, Seymour Papert,
Jerry Fodor, Zenon Pylyshyn, John Anderson, Tom Bever, and Robert Hadley,
and it is acknowledged as well by neural network modelers who are not in the
connectionist school, such as John Hummel, Lokendra Shastri, and Paul
Smolensky.':' I have written at length on the limits of connectionism, both in
scholarly papers and in popular books; here is a summary of my own case. 14

In a section called "Connectoplasm" in How the Mind Works, I laid out
some simple logical relationships that underlie our understanding of a com¬
plete thought (such as the meaning of-a sentence) but that are difficult to rep¬
resent in generic networks." One is the distinction between a kind and an
individual: between ducks in general and this duck in particular. Both have the
same features (swims, quacks, has feathers, and so on), and both are thus rep¬
resented by the same set of active units in a standard connectionist model. But
people know the difference.

A second talent is compositionality: the ability to entertain a new, com¬
plex thought that is not just the sum of the simple thoughts composing it but
depends on their relationships. The thought that cats chase mice, for example,
cannot be captured by activating a unit each for "cats;' "mice;’ and "chase;' be¬
cause that pattern could just as easily stand for mice chasing cats.

A third logical talent is quantification (or the binding of variables): the
difference between fooling some of the people all of the time and fooling all of
the people some of the time. Without the computational equivalent ofx’s, y’s,
parentheses, and statements like "For allx, "a model cannot tell the difference.

A fourth is recursion: the ability to embed one thought inside another, so
that we can entertain not only the thought that Elvis lives, but the thought that
the National Enquirer reported that Elvis lives, that some people believe the
National Enquirer report that Elvis lives, that it is amazing that some people
believe the National Enquirer report that Elvis lives, and so on. Connectionist
networks would superimpose these propositions and thereby confuse their
various subjects and predicates.

A final elusive talent is our ability to engage in categorical, as opposed to
fuzzy, reasoning: to understand that Bob Dylan is a grandfather, even though
he is not very grandfatherly, or that shrews are not rodents, though they look
just like mice. With nothing but a soup of neurons to stand for an object's
properties, and no provision for rules, variables, and definitions, the networks
fall back on stereotypes and are bamboozled by atypical examples.

80 /The Blank Slate, the Noble Savage, and the Ghost in the Machine

In Words and Rules I aimed a microscope on a single phenomenon of lan¬
guage that has served as a test case for the ability of generic associative net¬
works to account for the essence of language: assembling words, or pieces of
words, into new combinations. People don't just memorize snatches of lan¬
guage but create new ones. A simple example is the English past tense. Given a
.neologism like to spam or to snarl, people don't have to run to the dictionary
to look up their past-tense forms; they instinctively know that they are
spammed and snarfed. The talent for assembling new combinations appears as
early as age two, when children overapply the past-tense suffix to irregular
verbs, as in Weholded the baby rabbits and Horton beared a Who. 16

The obvious way to explain this talent is to appeal to two kinds of compu¬
tational operations in the mind: Irregular forms like held and heard are stored
in and retrieved from memory, just like any other word. Regular forms like
walk-walked can be generated by a mental version of the grammatical rule
"Add -ed to the verb.” The rule can apply whenever memory fails. It may be
used when a word is unfamiliar and no past-tense form had been stored in
memory, as in to spam, and it may be used by children when they cannot recall
an irregular form like heard and need some way of marking its tense. Com¬
bining a suffix with a verb is a small example of an important human talent:
combining words and phrases to create new sentences and thereby express
new thoughts. It is one of the new ideas of the cognitive revolution introduced
in Chapter 3, and one of the logical challenges for connectionism I listed in the
preceding discussion.

Connectionists have used the past tense as a proving ground to see if they
could duplicate this textbook example of human creativity without using a
rule and without dividing the labor between a system for memory and a sys¬
tem for grammatical combination. A series of computer models have tried to
generate past-tense forms using simple pattern associator networks. The net¬
works typically connect the sounds in verbs with the sounds in the past-tense
form: -am with -ammed, -mg with -ung, and so on. The models can then gen¬
erate new forms by analogy, just like the generalization from tigers to lions:
trained on crammed, a model can guess spammed; trained on folded, it tends to
say holded.

But human speakers do far more than associate sounds with sounds, and
the models thus fail to do them justice. The failures come from the absence of
machinery to handle logical relationships. Most of the models are baffled by
new words that sound different from familiar words and hence cannot be gen¬
eralized by analogy. Given the novel verb to frilg, for example, they come up
not with frilged, as people do, but with an odd mishmash lik efreezled. That is
because they lack the device of a variable, like x in algebra or "verb" in gram¬
mar, which can apply to any member of a category, regardless of how familiar

The Slate's Last Stand / 81

its properties are. (This is the gadget that allows people to engage in categori¬
cal rather than fuzzy reasoning.) The networks can only associate bits of
sound with bits of sound, so when confronted with a new verb that does not
sound like anything they were trained on, they assemble a pastiche ofthe most
similar sounds they can find in their network.

The models also cannot properly distinguish among verbs that have the
same sounds but different past-tense forms, such as ring the bell-rangthe bell
and ring the city-ringed the city. That is because the standard models represent
only sound and are blind to the grammatical differences among verbs that call
for different conjugations. The key difference here is between simple roots like
ring in the sense of "resonate" (past tense rang) and complex verbs derived
from nouns like ring in the sense of "form a ring around" (past tense ringed).
To register that difference, a language-using system has to be equipped with
compositional data structures (such as "a verb made from the noun ring") and
not just a beanbag of units.

Yet another problem is that connectionist networks track the statistics of
the input closely: how many verbs of each sound pattern they have encoun¬
tered. That leaves them unable to account for the epiphany in which young
children discover the -ed rule and start making errors like liolded and beared.
Connectionist modelers can induce these errors only by bombarding the net¬
work with regular verbs (so as to burn in the -ed) in a way that is unlike any¬
thing real children experience. Finally, a mass of evidence from cognitive
neuroscience shows that grammatical combination (including regular verbs)
and lexical lookup (including irregular verbs) are handled by different systems
in the brain rather than by a single associative network.

It's not that neural networks are incapable of handling the meanings of
sentences or the task of grammatical conjugation. (They had better not be,
since the very idea that thinking is a form of neural computation requires that
some kind of neural network duplicate whatever the mind can do.IThe prob¬
lem lies in the credo that one can do everything with a generic model as long
as it is sufficiently trained. Many modelers have beefed up, retrofitted, or com¬
bined networks into more complicated and powerful systems. They have ded¬
icated hunks of neural hardware to abstract symbols like "verb phrase” and
"proposition" and have implemented additional mechanisms (such as syn¬
chronized firing patterns) to bind them together in the equivalent of compo¬
sitional, recursive symbol structures. They have installed banks of neurons for
words, or for English suffixes, or for key grammatical distinctions. They have
built hybrid systems, with one network that retrieves irregular forms from
memory and another that combines a verb with a suffix.i?

A system assembled out of beefed-up subnetworks could escape all the
criticisms. But then we would no longer be talking about a generic neural net¬
work! We would be talking about a complex system innately tailored to com-

82/The Blank Slate, the Noble Savage, and the Ghost in the Machine

pute a task that people are good at. In the children's story called "Stone Soup;’
a hobo borrows the use of a woman's kitchen ostensibly to make soup from a
stone. But he gradually asks for more and more ingredients to balance the fla¬
vor until he has prepared a rich and hearty stew at her expense. Connectionist
modelers who claim to build intelligence out of generic neural networks with¬
out requiring anything innate are engaged in a similar business. The design
choices that make a neural network system smart-what each of the neurons
represents, how they are wired together, what kinds of networks are assembled
into a bigger system, in which way-embody the innate organization of the
part of the mind being modeled. They are typically hand-picked by the mod¬
eler, like an inventor rummaging through a box of transistors and diodes, but
in a real brain they would have evolved by natural selection (indeed, in some
networks, the architecture of the model does evolveby a simulation of natural
selection) is The only alternative is that some previous episode of learning left
the networks in a state ready for the current learning, but of course the buck
has to stop at some innate specification of the first networks that kick off the
learning process.

So the rumor that neural networks can replace mental structure with sta¬
tistical learning is not true. Simple, generic networks are not up to the de¬
mands of ordinary human thinking and speaking; complex, specialized
networks are a stone soup in which much of the interesting work has been
done in setting up the innate wiring of the network. Once this is recognized,
neural network modeling becomes an indispensable complement to the the¬
ory of a complex human nature rather than a replacement for it." It bridges
the gap between the elementary steps of cognition and the physiological activ¬
ity of the brain and thus serves as an important link in the long chain of ex¬
planation between biology and culture.

for most of its history, neuroscience was faced with an embarrassment: the
brain looked as if it were innately specified in every detail. When it comes to
the body, we can see, many of the effects of a person's life experience: it may be
tanned or pale, callused or soft, scrawny or plump or chiseled. But no such
marks could be found in the brain. Now, something has to be wrong with this
picture. People learn, and learn massively: they learn their language, their cul¬
ture, their know-how, their database of facts. Also, the hundred trillion con¬
nections in the brain cannot possibly be specified individually by a
750-megabyte genome. The brain somehow must change in response to its
input; the only question is how.

We are finally beginning to understand how. The study of neural plastic¬
ity is hot. Almost every week sees a discovery about how the brain gets wired
in the womb and tuned outside it. After all those decades in which no one
could find anything that changed in the brain, it is not surprising that the

The Slate's Last Stand / 83

discovery of plasticity has given the nature-nurture pendulum a push. Some
people describe plasticity as a harbinger of an expansion of human potential
in which the powers of the brain will be harnessed to revolutionize childrear¬
ing, education, therapy, and aging. And several manifestos have proclaimed
that plasticity proves that the brain cannot have any significant innate organi¬
zation." In Rethinking Innateness, Jeffrey Elman and a team of West Pole con-
nectionists write that predispositions to think about different things in
different ways (language, people, objects, and so on) may be implemented in
the brain only as "attention-grabbers" that ensure that the organism will re¬
ceive «massive experience of certain inputs priorto subsequent learning,"?' In
a «constructivist manifesto," the theoretical neuroscientists Stephen Quartz
and Terrence Sejnowski write that «although the cortex is not a tabula rasa ...
it is largely equipotential at early stages;' and therefore that innatist theories
«appear implausible."22

Neural development and plasticity unquestionably make up one of the
great frontiers of human knowledge. How a linear string of DNA can direct
the assembly of an intricate three-dimensional organ that lets us think, feel,
and learn is a problem to stagger the imagination, to keep neuroscientists en¬
gaged for decades, and to belie any suggestion that we are approaching «the
end of science."

And the discoveries themselves are fascinating and provocative. The cere¬
bral cortex (outer gray matter) of the brain has long been known to be divided
into areas with different functions. Some represent particular body parts; oth¬
ers represent the visual field or the world of sound; still others concentrate on
aspects of language or thinking. We now know that with learning and practice
some of their boundaries can move around. (This does not mean that the
brain tissue literally grows or shrinks, only that if the cortex is probed with
electrodes or monitored with a scanner, the boundary where one ability leaves
off and the next one begins can shift.) Violinists, for example, have an ex¬
panded region of cortex representing the fingers of the left hand.” If a person
or a monkey is trained on a simple task like recognizing shapes or attending to
a location in space, neuroscientists can watch as parts of the cortex, or even in¬
dividual neurons, take on the job."

The reallocation of brain tissue to new tasks is especially dramatic when
people lose the use of a sense or body part. Congenitally blind people use their
visual cortex to read Braille." Congenitally deaf people use part of their audi¬
tory cortex to process sign language." Amputees use the part of the cortex
formerly serving the missing limb to represent other parts of their bodies."
Young children can grow up relatively normal after traumas to the brain that
would turn adults into basket cases-even removal of the entire left hemi¬
sphere, which in adults underlies language and logical reasoning." All this

84/The Blank Slate, the Noble Savage, and the Ghost in the Machine

suggests that the allocation of brain tissue to perceptual and cognitive
processes is not done permanently and on the basis of the exact location of the
tissue in the skull) but depends on how the brain itself processes information.

This dynamic allocation of tissue can also be seen as the brain puts itself
together in the womb. Unlike a computer that gets assembled in a factory and
is turned on for the first time when complete) the brain is active while it is
being assembled) and that activity may take part in the assembly process. Ex¬
periments on cats and other mammals have shown that if a brain is chemically
silenced during fetal development it may end up with significant abnormali¬
ties." And patches of cortex develop differently depending on the kind of
input they receive. In an experimental tour de force) the neuroscientist Mrig-
anka Sur literally rewired the brains of ferrets so that signals from their eyes fed
into the primary auditory cortex) the part of the brain that ordinarily receives
signals from the ears.” When he then probed the auditory cortex with elec¬
trodes) he found that it acted in many ways like the visual cortex. Locations in
the visual field were laid out like a map) and individual neurons responded to
lines and stripes at a particular orientation and direction of movement) simi¬
lar to the neurons in an ordinary visual cortex. The ferrets could even use their
rewired brains to move toward objects that were detectable by sight alone. The
input to the sensory cortex must help to organize it: visual input makes the
auditory cortex work something like the visual cortex.

What do these discoveries mean? Do they show that the brain is "able to be
shaped) molded) modeled) or sculpted:' as the dictionary definition of plastic
would suggest? In the rest of this chapter I will show you that the answer is
no." Discoveries of how the brain changes with experience do not show that
learning is more powerful than we thought) that the brain can be dramatically
reshaped by its input, or that the genes do not shape the brain. Indeed, demon¬
strations of the plasticity of the brain are less radical than they first appear: the
supposedly plastic regions of cortex are doing pretty much the same thing they
would have been doing if they had never been altered. And the most recent dis¬
coveries on brain development have refuted the idea that the brain is largely
plastic. Let me go overthese points in turn.

THE FACT THAT the brain changes when we learn is not) as some have
claimed) a radical discovery with profound implications for nature and nur¬
ture or human potential. Dmitri Karamazov could have deduced it in his
nineteenth-century prison cell as he mulled over the fact that thinking comes
from quivering nerve tails rather than an immaterial soul. If thought and ac¬
tion are products of the physical activity of the brain) and if thought and
action can be affected by experience) then experience has to leave a trace in
the physical structure of the brain.

The Slate's Last Stand / 85

So there is no scientific question as to whether experience, learning, and
practice affect the brain; they surely do if we are even vaguely on the right
track. It is not surprising-that people who can play the violin have different
brains from those who cannot, or that masters of sign language or of Braille
have different brains from people who speak and read. Your brain changes
when you are introduced to a new person, when you hear a bit of gossip, when
you watch the Oscars, when you polish your golf stroke-in short, whenever
an experience leaves a trace in the mind. The only question is how learning af¬
fects the brain. Are memories stored in protein sequences, in new neurons or
synapses, or in changes in the strength of existing synapses? When someone
learns a new skill, is it stored only in organs dedicated to learning skills (like
the cerebellum and the basal ganglia), or does it also adjust the cortex? Does an
increase in dexterity depend on using more square centimeters of cortex or on
using a greater concentration of synapses in the same number of square cen¬
timeters? These are important scientific problems, but they say nothing about
whether people can learn, or how much. We already knew trained violinists
play better than beginners or we would never have put their heads in the scan¬
ner to begin with. Neural plasticity is just another name for learning and de¬
velopment, described at a different level of analysis.

All this should be obvious, but nowadays any banality about learning can
be dressed up in neurospeak and treated like a great revelation of science. Ac¬
cording to a New York Times'headline, «Talk therapy, a psychiatrist maintains,
can alter the structure of the patient's brain,"?’ I should hope so, or else the
psychiatrist would be defrauding her clients. «Environmental manipulation
can change the way [a child's] brain develops;' the pediatric neurologist Harry
Chugani told the Boston Globe. “A child surrounded by aggression, violence, or
inadequate stimulation will reflect these connections in the brain and behav-
ior.»33 Well, yes; if the environment affects the child at all, it would do so by
changing connections in the brain. A special issue of the journal Educational
Technology and Society was intended «to examine the position that learning
takes place in the brain of the learner, and that pedagogies and technologies
should be designed and evaluated on the basis of the effect they have on stu¬
dent brains." The guest editor (a biologist) did not say whether the alternative
was that learning takes place in some other organ of the body like the pancreas
or that it takes place in an immaterial soul. Even professors of neuroscience
sometimes proclaim «discoveries" that would be news only to believers in a
ghost in the machine: «Scientists have found that the brain is capable of alter¬
ing its connections_You have the ability to change the synaptic connec¬

tions within the brain.»34 Good thing, because otherwise we would be
permanent amnesiacs.

This neuroscientist is an executive at a company that «uses brain research

86/The Blank Slate, the Noble Savage, and the Ghost in the Machine

and technology to develop products intended to enhance human learning and
performance:' one of many new companies with that aspiration. "The human
being has unlimited creativity if focused and nurtured properly:' says a consul¬
tant who teaches clients to draw diagrams that "map their neural patterns,"
«The older you get, the more connections and associations your brain should
be making:' said a satisfied customer; «Therefore you should have more infor¬
mation stored in your brain. Youjust need to tap into it.»35 Many people have
been convinced by the public pronouncements of neuroscience advocates-
on the basis of no evidence whatsoever-that varying the route you take when
driving home can stave off the effects of aging." And then there is the market-
inggenius who realized that blocks, balls, and other toys «provide visual and
tactile stimulation» and «encourage movement and tracking;' part of a larger
movement of «brain-based» childrearing and education that we will meet
again in the chapter on children."

These companies tap into people's belief in a ghost in the machine by im¬
plying that any form of learning that affects the brain (as opposed, presumably,
to the kinds of learning that don't affect the brain) is unexpectedly real or deep
or powerful. But this is mistaken. All learning affects the brain. It is undeniably
exciting when scientists make a discovery about how learning affects the brain,
but that does not make the learning itself any more pervasive or profound.

A second misinterpretation of neural plasticity can be traced to the be¬
lief that there is nothing in the mind that was not first in the senses. The most
highly publicized discoveries about cortical plasticity concern primary sen¬
sory cortex, the patches of gray matter that first receive signals from the senses
(via the thalamus and other subcortical organs). Writers who use plasticity to
prop up the Blank Slate assume that if primary sensory cortex is plastic, the
rest of the brain must be even more plastic, because the mind is built out of
sensory experience. For example, one neuroscientist was quoted as saying that
Sur's rewiring experiments «challenge the recent emphasis on the power of the
genes»and «willpush people back toward more consideration of environmen¬
tal factors in creating normal brain organization.?"

But if the brain is a complex organ with many parts, the moral does not
follow. Primary sensory cortex is not the bedrock of the mind but a gadget,
one of many in the brain, that happens to be specialized for certain kinds of
signal processing in the first stages of sensory analysis. Let’s suppose that pri¬
mary sensory cortex really were formless, getting all its structure from the
input. Would that mean that the entire brain is formless and gets all of its
structure from the input? Not at all. For one thing, even primary sensory cor¬
tex is just one part of a huge, intricate system. To put things in perspective,
here is a recent diagram of the wiring of the primate visual system."

The Slate's Last Stand / 87

Primary visual cortex is the box near the bottom labeled "VI." It is one ofat
least fifty distinct brain areas devoted to visual processing, and they are inter¬
connected in precise ways. (Despite the spaghetti-like appearance, not every¬
thing is connected to everything else. Only about a third of the logically
possible connections between components are actually present in the brain.)
Primary visual cortex, by itself, is not enough to see with. Indeed, it is so deeply
buried in the visual system that Francis Crick and the neuroscientist Christof
Koch have argued that we are not conscious of anything that goes on in it. 40
What we see-familiar colored objects arranged in a scene or moving in par-

88/The Blank Slate, the Noble Savage, and the Ghost in the Machine

ticular ways-is a product of the entire contraption. So even if the innards of
the VI box were completely specified by its input) we would have to explain the
architecture of the rest of the visual system-the fifty boxes and their connec¬
tions. I don’t mean to imply that the entire block diagram is genetically speci¬
fied) but much of it almost certainly is."

And ofcourse the visual system itself must be put into perspective) because
it is just one part of the brain. The visual system dominates some half-dozen of
the more than fifty major areas of the cortex that can be distinguished by their
anatomy and connections. Many of the others underlie other functions such as
language, reasoning) planning) and social skills. Though no one knows to what
extent they are genetically prepared for their computational roles) there are
hints that the genetic influence is substantial.f The divisions are established in
the womb) even if the cortex is cut off from sensory input during development.
As development proceeds, different sets of genes are activated in different re¬
gions. The brain has a well-stocked toolbox of mechanisms to interconnect
neurons, including molecules that attract or repel axons (the output fibers of
neurons) to guide them to their targets) and molecules that glue them in place
or ward them away. The number) size) and connectivity of cortical areas differ
among species of mammals) and they differ between humans and other pri¬
mates. This diversity is caused by genetic changes in the course of evolution
that are beginning to be understood." Geneticists recently discovered) for ex¬
ample, that different sets of genes are activated in the developing brain ofhu-
mans and the developing brains of chimpanzees.44

The possibility that cortical areas are specialized for different tasks has
been obscured by the fact that different parts of the cortex look similar under
a microscope. But because the brain is an information-processing system) that
means little. The microscopic pits on a CD look the same regardless of what is
recorded on it) and the strings of characters in different books look the same
to someone who cannot read them. In an information-carrying medium, the
content lies in combinatorial patterns among the elements-in the case of the
brain) the details of the microcircuitry-and not in their physical appearance.

And the cortex itself is not the entire brain. Tucked beneath the cortex are
other brain organs that drive important parts of human nature. They include
the hippocampus) which consolidates memory and supports mental maps, the
amygdala, which colors experience with certain emotions) and the hypothala¬
mus) which originates sexual desire and other appetites. Many neuroscientists,
even when they are impressed by the plasticity of the cortex) acknowledge that
subcortical structures are far less plastic." This is not a minor cavil about
anatomy. Some commentators have singled out evolutionary psychology as a
casualty of neural plasticity, saying that the changeability of the cortex proves
that the brain cannot support evolutionary specializations." But most pro¬
posals in evolutionary psychology are about drives like fear, sex) love) and

The Slate's Last Stand / 89

aggression, which reside largely in subcortical circuitry. More generally, on
anyone's theory an innately shaped human ability would have to be imple¬
mented in a networkof cortical and subcortical areas, not in a single patch of
sensory cortex.

ANOTHER BASIC POINT about the brain has been lost in the recent enthusi¬
asm for plasticity. A discovery that neural activity is crucial for brain develop¬
ment does not show either that learning is crucial in shaping the brain or that
genes fail to shape the brain.

The study of neural development is often framed in terms of nature and
nurture, but it is more fruitful to think of it as a problem in developmental bi¬
ology-how a ball of identical cells differentiates into a functioning organ.
Doing so stands the conventional assumptions of associationism on their
head. Primary sensory cortex, rather than being the firmest part of the brain
on top of which successive stories can only be even more plastic, may be the
part of the brain that is most dependent on the input for proper development.

In assembling a brain, a complete genetic blueprint is out of the question
for two reasons. One is that a gene cannot anticipate every detail of the envi¬
ronment, including the environment consisting of the other genes in the
genome. It has to specify an adaptive developmental program that ensures that
the organism as a whole functions properly across variations in nutrition,
other genes, growth rates over the lifespan, random perturbations, and the
physical and social environment. And that requires feedback from the way the
rest of the organism is developing.

Take the development of the body. The genes that build a femur cannot
specify the exact shape ofthe ball on top, because the ball has to articulate with
the socket in the pelvis, which is shaped by other genes, nutrition, age, and
chance. So the ball and the socket adjust their shapes as they rotate against
each other while the baby kicks in the womb. (We know this because experi¬
mental animals that are paralyzed while they develop end up with grossly de¬
formed joints.) Similarly, the genes shaping the lens ofthe growing eye cannot
know how far back the retina is going to be or vice versa. So the brain of the
baby is equipped with a feedback loop that uses signals about the sharpness of
the image on the retina to slow down or speed up the physical growth of the
eyeball. These are good examples of "plasticity;' but the metaphor of plastic
material is misleading. The mechanisms are not designed to allow variable en¬
vironments to shape variable organs. They do the opposite: they ensure that
despite variable environments, a constant organ develops, one that is capable
of doing its job.

Like the body, the brain must use feedback circuits to shape itself into a
working system. This is especially true in the sensory areas, which have to cope
with growing sense organs. For that reason alone we would expect the activity

90/The Blank Slate, the Noble Savage, and the Ghost in the Machine

of the brain to playa role in its own development, even if its end state, like
those of the femur and the eyeball, is in some sense genetically specified. How
this happens is still largely a mystery, but we know that patterns of neural stim¬
ulation can trigger the expression of a gene and that one gene can trigger many
others." Since every brain cell contains a complete genetic program, the ma¬
chinery exists, in principle, for neural activity to trigger the development of an
innately organized neural circuitry in any of several different regions. If so,
brain activity would not be sculpting the brain; it would merely be telling the
genome where in the brain a certain neural circuit should go.

So even an extreme innatist need not believe that the brain differentiates
itself by the equivalent of GPS coordinates in the skull, following rules like "If
you are between the left temple and the left ear, become a language circuit" (or
a fear circuit, or a circuit for recognizing faces). A developmental program
may be triggered in a part of the developing brain by some combination of the
source of the stimulation, the firing pattern, the chemical environment, and
other signals. The end result may be a faculty that is seated in different parts of
the brain in different people. After all, the brain is the organ of computation,
and the same computation can happen in different places as long as the pat¬
tern of information flow is the same. In your computer, a file or program may
sit in different parts of memory or be fragmented across different sectors of
the disk and work the same way in every case. It would not be surprising if the
growing brain were at least that dynamic in allocating neural resources to
computational demands.

The other reason that brains can't rely on a complete genetic blueprint is
that the genome is a limited resource. Genes are constantly mutating over evo¬
lutionary time, and natural selection can weed out the bad ones only slowly.
Most evolutionary biologists believe that natural selection can support a
genome that is only so big. That means that the genetic plans for a complex
brain have to be compressed to the minimum size that is consistent with the
brain's developing and working properly. Though more than half the genome
is put to work primarily or exclusively in the brain, that is not nearly enough
to specify the brain's connection diagram.

The development program for the brain has to be resourceful. Take the
problem of getting every axon (output fiber) from the eyes to connect to the
brain in an orderly way.Neighboring points in the eye must connect to neigh¬
boring points in the brain (an arrangement called topographic mapping), and
corresponding locations in the two eyes should end up near each other in the
brain but not get mixed up with eachother.

Rather than give each axon a genetically specified address, the mammalian
brain may organize the connections in a cleverer way. In her studies of brain
development in cats, the neuroscientist Carla Shatz has discovered that waves
of activity flow across each retina, first in one direction, then in some other di-

The Slate’s Last Stand / 91

rection." That means that neurons that are next to each other in a single eye
will tend to fire at around the same time, because they are often hit by the same
wavefront. But axons from different eyes, or from distant locations in the same
eye, will be uncorrelated in their activity, because a wave passing over one will
miss the other. Just as you could reconstruct the seating diagram of a stadium
if the fans were doing “the wave" along various directions and you knew only
who stood up at which time (since people who stood up at the same time had
to be seated near each other), the brain could reconstruct the spatial layout of
the two eyes by listening for which sets of input neurons were firing at the
same time. One of the rules of learning in neural networks, first outlined by
the psychologist D. 0. Hebb, is that "neurons that fire together wire together;
neurons out of synch fail to link." As the waves crisscross the retina for days
and weeks, the visual thalamus downstream could organize itself into layers,
each from a single eye, with adjacent neurons responding to adjacent parts of
the retina. The cortex, in theory, could organize its wiring in a similar way."

Which parts of the brain actually use this auto-installation technique is
another matter. The visual system does not appear to need the technique to
grow topographically organized wiring; a rough topographic map develops
under the direct control of the genes. Some neuroscientists believe that the
fire-together-wire-together technique may still be used to make the maps
more precise or to segregate the inputs from the two eyes.so That, too, has been
challenged, but let us assume it is correct and see what it means.

The fire-together-wire-together process could, in theory, be set in motion
by letting the eyeballs gaze at the world. The world has lines and edges that
stimulate neighboring parts of the retina at the same time, and that provides
the information the brain needs to set up or fine-tune an orderly map. But in
the case of Shatz's cats, it works without any environmental input at all. The vi¬
sual system develops in the pitch-dark womb, before the animal's eyes are
open and before its rods and cones are even hooked up and functioning. The
retinal waves are generated endogenously by the tissues of the retina during
the period in which the visual brain has to wire itself up. In other words, the
eye generates a test pattern, and the brain uses it to complete its own assembly.
Ordinarily, axons from the eye carry information about things in the world,
but the developmental program co-opted those axons to carry information
about which neurons come from the same eye or the same place in the eye. A
rough analogy occurred to me when I watched the cable TV installer figure out
which cable in the basement led to a particular room upstairs. He attached a
tone generator called a "screamer” to the end in the bedroom and then ran
downstairs to listen for the signal on each cable in the bouquet coming out of
the wall. Though the cables were designed to carry a television signal upstairs,
not a test tone downstairs, they lent themselves to this other use during the in¬
stallation process because an information conduit is useful for both purposes.

92/The Blank Slate, the Noble Savage, and the Ghost in the Machine

The moral is that a discovery that brain development depends on brain activ¬
ity may say nothing about learning or experience, only that the brain takes ad¬
vantage of its own information-transmission abilities while wiring itself up.

Fire-together-wire-together is a trick that solves a particular kind ofwiring
problem: connecting a surface of receptors to a maplike representation in the
cortex. The problem is found not just in the visual system but in other spatial
senses such as touch. That is because the problem of tiling a patch of primary
visual cortex, which receives information from the 2-D surface of the retina, is
similar to the problem of tiling a patch of primary somatosensory cortex,
which receives information from the 2-D surface ofthe skin. Even the auditory
system may use the trick, because the inputs representing different sound fre¬
quencies (roughly, pitches) originate in a I-D membrane in the inner ear, and
the brain treats pitch in audition the way it treats space in vision and touch.

But the trick may be useless elsewhere in the brain. The olfactory (smell)
system, for example, wires itself by a completely different technique. Unlike
sights, sounds, and touches, which are arranged by location when they arrive
at the sensory cortex, smells arrive all mixed together, and they are analyzed in
terms ofthe chemical compounds making them up, each detected by a differ¬
ent receptor in the nose. Each receptor connects to a neuron that carries its sig¬
nal into the brain, and in this case the genome really does use a different gene
for each axon when wiring .them into their respective places in the brain, a
thousand genes in all. It economizes on genes in a remarkable way.The protein
produced by each gene is used twice: once in the nose, as a receptor to detect
an airborne chemical, and a second time in the brain, as a probe at the end of
the corresponding axon to direct it to its proper spot in the olfactory bulb. 51

The wiring problems are different again for other parts ofthe brain, such
as the medulla, which generates the swallowing reflex and other fixed action
patterns; the amygdala, which handles fear and other emotions; and the
ventromedial frontal cortex, which is involved in social reasoning. The fire-
together-wire-together technique may be an ideal method for sensory maps
and other structures that simply have to reproduce redundancies in the world
or in other parts ofthe brain, such as primary sensory cortex for seeing, touch¬
ing, and hearing. But other regions evolved with different functions, such as
smelling or swallowing or avoiding danger or winning friends, and they have
to be wired by more complicated techniques. This is simply a corollary of the
general point with which I began the chapter: the environment cannot tell
the various parts of an organism what their goals are.

The doctrine of extreme plasticity has used the plasticity discovered in
primary sensory cortex as a metaphor for what happens elsewhere in the brain.
The upshot of these two sections is that it is not a very good metaphor. If the
plasticity of sensory cortex symbolized the plasticity of mental life as a whole,
it should be easy to change what we don't like about ourselves or other people.

The Slate's Last Stand / 93

Take a case very different from vision, sexual orientation. Most gay men feel
stirrings of attraction to other males around the time of the first hormonal
changes that presage puberty. No one knows why some boys become gay-
genes, prenatal hormones, other biological causes) and chance may all playa
role-but my point is not so much about becoming gay as about becoming
straight. In the less tolerant past, unhappy gay men sometimes approached
psychiatrists (and sometimes were coerced into approaching them) for help in
changing their sexual orientation. Even today, some religious groups pressure
their gay members to "choose" heterosexuality. Many techniques have been
foisted on them: psychoanalysis, guilt mongering) and conditioning tech¬
niques that use impeccable fire-together-wire-together logic (for example)
having them look at Playboy centerfolds while sexually aroused). The tech¬
niques are all failures. 52 With a few dubious exceptions (which are probablyin-
stances of conscious self-control rather than a change in desire), the sexual
orientation of most gay men cannot be reversed by experience. Some parts of
the mind just aren't plastic) and no discoveries about how sensory cortex gets
wired will change that fact.

WHAT is THE brain actually doing when, it undergoes the changes we call
plasticity? One commentator called it “the brain equivalent of Christ turning
water into wine" and thus a disproof of any theory that parts of the brain have
been specialized for their jobs by evolution. 53 Those who don't believe in mir¬
acles are skeptical. Neural tissue is not a magical substance that can assume any
form demanded of it but a mechanism that obeys the laws of cause and effect.
When we take a closer look at the prominent examples of plasticity, we dis¬
cover that the changes are not miracles after all. In every case, the altered cor-\
tex is not doing anything very different from what it ordinarily does. J

Most demonstrations of plasticity involve remappings within primary
sensory cortex. A brain area for an amputated or immobilized finger may be
taken over by an adjacent finger)or a brain area for a stimulated finger expands
its borders at the expense of a neighbor. The brain's ability to reweight its in¬
puts is indeed remarkable, but the kind of information processing done by the
taken-over cortex has not fundamentally changed: the cortex is still processing
information about the surface of the skin and the angles of the joints. And the
representation of a digit or part of the visual field cannot grow indefinitely) no
matter how much it is stimulated; the intrinsic wiring of the brain would pre¬
vent it. 54

What about the takeover of the visual cortex by Braille in blind people? At
first glance it looks like real transubstantiation. But maybe not. We are not wit-,
nessing just any talent taking over just any vacant lot in the cortex. Braille read¬
ing may use the anatomy of the visual cortex in the same way that seeing does.

Neuroanatomists have long known that there are as many fibers bringing

94/The Blank Slate, the Noble Savage, and the Ghost in the Machine

information down into the visual cortex from other brain areas as there are
bringing information up from the eyes .55 These top-down connections could
have several uses. They may aim a spotlight of attention on portions of the
visual field, or coordinate vision with the other senses, or group pixels into
regions, or implement mental imagery, the ability to visualize things in the
mind's eye." Blind people may simply be using these prewired top-down con¬
nections to read Braille. They may be "imagining" the rows of dots as they feel
them, much as a blindfolded person can imagine objects placed in his hand,
though of course far more rapidly. (Previous research has established that
blind people have mental images-perhaps even visual images-containing
spatial information.P? The visual cortex is well suited to the kind of computa¬
tion needed for Braille. In sighted people the eyes scan around a scene, bring¬
ing fine detail into the fovea, the high-resolution center of the retina. This is
similar to moving the hands over a line of Braille, bringing fine detail under
the high-resolution skin of the fingertips. So the visual system may be func¬
tioning in blind people much as it does in sighted ones, despite the lack of
input'from the eyes. Years of practice at imagining the tactile world and at¬
tending to the details of Braille have led the visual cortex to make maximal use
of the innate inputs from other parts of the brain.

With deafness, too, one of the senses is taking over the controls of suitable')
circuitry, rather than just moving into any old unoccupied territory. Laura
Petitto and her colleagues found that deaf people use the superior gyrus of
the temporal lobe (a region near the primary auditory cortex) to recognize the
elements of signs in sign languages, just as hearing people use it to process
speech sounds in spoken languages. They also found that the deaf use the lat-\
.eral prefrontal cortex to retrieve signs from memory, just as hearing people use )
(it to retrieve words from memory," This should come as no surprise. As lin¬
guists have long known, sign languages are organized much like spoken lan¬
guages. They use words, a grammar, and even phonological rules that combine
meaningless gestures into meaningful signs, just as phonological rules in spo¬
ken languages combine meaningless sounds into meaningful words'? Spoken
languages, moreover, are partly modular: the representations for words and
rules can be distinguished from the input-output systems that connect them
to the ears and the mouth. The simplest interpretation, endorsed by Petitto
/and her colleagues, is that the cortical areas recruited in signers are specialized
j for language (words and rules), not for speech per se. What the areas are doing
\in deaf people is the same as what they are doing in hearing people.

Let me turn to the most amazing plasticity of all: the rewired ferrets whose
eyes fed their auditory thalamus and cortex and made those areas work like a
visual thalamus and cortex. Even here, water is not being turned into wine. Sur
and his colleagues noted the redirected input did not change the actual wiring
of the auditory brain, only the pattern of synaptic strengths. As a result they

The Slate's Last Stand / 95

found many differences between the co-opted auditory brain and a normal
visual brain/" The representation of the visual field in the auditory brain was
fuzzier and more disorganized, because the tissue is optimized for auditory,
not visual, analysis. The map of the visual field, for instance, was far more pre¬
cise in the left-right direction than in the up-down direction. That is because
the left-right direction was mapped onto an axis of the auditory cortex that in
normal animals represents different sound frequencies and thus gets inputs
from the inner ear that are precisely arranged in order'of frequency. But the
up-down direction was mapped onto the perpendicular axis of the auditory
cortex, which ordinarily gets a mass of inputs of the same frequency. Sur also
notes that the connections between the primary auditory cortex and other
brain areas for hearing (the equivalent of the wiring diagram for the visual sys¬
tem on page 88) were unchanged by the new input.

So patterns in the input can tune a patch of sensory cortex to mesh with
that input, but only within the limits of the wiring already present. Sur sug¬
gests that the reason the auditory cortex in the rewired ferrets can process vi¬
sual information at all is that certain kinds of signal processing may be useful
to perform on raw sensory input, whether it is visual, auditory, or tactile:

On this view, one function of sensory thalamus or cortex is to perform \
certain stereotypical operations on input regardlessof modality [vision,
hearing, or touch]; the specifictype of sensory input of course provides
the substrate information that is transmitted and processed.... If the
normal organization of central auditory structures is not altered, or at
least not altered significantly, by visual input, then we might expect
some operations similar to those we observe on visual inputs in oper¬
ated ferrets to be carried out as well in the auditory pathway in normal
ferrets. In other words, the animals with visual inputs induced into the
auditory pathway provide a different window on some of the same op¬
erations that should occur normally in auditory thalamus and cortex."'

The suggestion that the auditory cortex is inherently suited to analyze vi¬
sual input is not far-fetched. I mentioned that frequency (pitch) in hearing be¬
haves a lot like space in vision. The mind treats soundmakers with different
pitches as if they were objects at different locations, and it treats jumps in pitch
like motions in space." This means that some of the analyses performed on
sights may be the same as the analyses performed on sounds, and could be
computed, at least in part, by similar kinds of circuitry. Inputs from an ear
represent different frequencies; inputs from an eye represent spots at different
locations. Neurons in the sensory cortex (both visual and auditory ) receive in¬
formation from a neighborhood of input fibers and extract simple patterns
from them. Therefore neurons in the auditory cortex that ordinarily detect

96/The Blank Slate, the Noble Savage, and the Ghost in the Machine

rising or falling glides, rich or pure tones, and sounds that come from specific
places may, in the rewired ferrets, automatically be capable of detecting lines of
specific slants, places, and directions of movement.

This is not to say that the primary auditory cortex can handle visual input
right out of the box. The cortex still must tune its synaptic connections in re¬
sponse to the patterns in the input. The rewired ferrets are a remarkable
demonstration of how the developing sensory cortex organizes itself into a
well-functioning system. But as in the other examples ofplasticity, they do not
show that input from the senses can transform an amorphous brain into
doing whatever would come in handy. The cortex has an intrinsic structure
that allows it to perform certain kinds of computation. Many examples of
"plasticity" may consist of making the input mesh with that structure.

ANYONE WHO HAS watched the Discovery Channel has seen footage of baby
wildebeests or zebras falling out of the birth canal, wobbling on shaky legs for
a minute or two, and then prancing around their mothers with their senses,
drives, and motor control fully operational. It happens far too quickly for pat-1
terned experience to have organized their brains, so there must be genetic
mechanisms capable of shaping the brain before birth. Neuroscientists were
aware of this before plasticity came into vogue. The first studies of the devel¬
opment of the visual system by David Hubei and Torsten Wiesel showed that
the microcircuitry of monkeys is pretty much complete at birth." Even their
famous demonstrations that the visual systems of cats can be altered by expe¬
rience during a critical period of development (by being reared in the dark, in
striped cylinders, or with one eye sewn shut) show only that experience is nec¬
essary to maintain the visual system and to retune it as the animal grows. They
do not show that experience is necessary to wire up the brain to start with.

We know in a general way how the brain assembles itself under the guid¬
ance of the genes." Even before the cortex has been formed, the neurons des¬
tined to make up different areas are organized into a"proto-map:'Each area in
the proto-map is composed of neurons with different properties, molecular
mechanisms that attract different input fibers, and different patterns of re¬
sponses to the input. Axons are attracted and repelled by many kinds of mole¬
cules dissolved in the surrounding fluid or attached to the membranes of
neighboring cells. And different sets of genes are expressed in different parts of
the growing cortex. The neuroscientist Lawrence Katz has lamented that fire-
together-wire-together has become a "dogma” keeping neuroscientists from
exploring the full reach of these genetic mechanisms.P

But the tide is beginning to turn, and recent discoveries are showing how
parts of the brain can organize themselves without any information from the
senses. In experiments that the journal Science called "heretical;' Katz's team
removed one or both eyes from a developing ferret, depriving the visual cortex

The Slate's Last Stand / 97

of all its input. Nonetheless, the visual cortex developed with the standard
arrangement of connections from the two eyes."

Genetically engineered mice have provided especially important clues, be¬
cause knocking out a single gene can be more precise than the conventional
techniques of poisoning neurons or slicing up the brain. One team invented a
mouse whose synapses were completely shut down, preventing neurons from
signaling to one another. Its brain developed fairly normally, complete with
layered structures, fiber pathways, and synapses in the right places." (The
brain degenerated quickly after birth, showing again that neural activity may
be more important in maintaining the brain than in wiring it.) Another team
designed a mouse with a useless thalamus, depriving the entire cortex of its
input. But the cortex differentiated into the normal layers and regions, each
with a different set of turned-on genes." A third study did the opposite, in¬
venting mice that were missing one of the genes that lay down gradients of
molecules that help organize the brain by triggering other genes in particular
places. The missing gene made a big difference: the boundaries among cortical
areas were badly warped." The studies with knockout mice, then, suggest that
genes may be more important than neural activity in organizing the cortex.
Neural activity undoubtedly plays a role, which depends on the species, the
stage of development, and the part of the brain, but it is just one capability of
the brain rather than the source of its structure.

What about our own species? Recall that a recent study of twins showed
that differences in the anatomy of the cortex, particularly the amount of gray
matter in different cortical regions, are under genetic control, paralleling dif¬
ferences in intelligence and other psychological traits." And demonstrations
of the plasticity of the human brain do not rule out substantial genetic organ¬
ization. One of the most commonly cited examples of plasticity in both hu¬
mans and monkeys is that the cortex dedicated to an amputated or numbed
body part may get reallocated to some other body part. But the fact that the
input can change the brain once it is built does not mean that the input
molded the brain in the first place. Most amputees experience phantom limbs:
;vivid, detailed hallucinations of the missing body part. Amazingly, a substan-
Itial proportion of people who were born with a limb missing experience these
Apparitions as well." They can describe the anatomy of their phantom limb
(for example, how many toes they feel in a nonexistent foot) and may even feel
that they are gesturing with their phantom hands during conversation. One
girl solved arithmetic problems by counting on her phantom fingers! The psy¬
chologist Ronald Melzack, who documented many of these cases, proposed
that the brain contains an innate "neurornatrix," distributed across several cor¬
tical and subcortical regions, dedicated to representing the body.

The impression that human brains are limitlessly plastic has also come
from demonstrations that children can sometimes recover from early brain

98/The Blank Slate, the Noble Savage, and the Ghost in the Machine

damage. But the existence of cerebral palsy-lifelong difficulties with motor
control and speech caused by malformations or early damage in the brain-
shows that even the plasticity of a child's brain has severe limits. The most fa¬
mous evidence for extreme plasticity in humans had been the ability of some
children to grow up relatively normal even with an entire hemisphere surgi¬
cally removed in infancy." But that may be a special case, which arises from
the fact that the primate brain is fundamentally a symmetrical organ. The typ¬
ically human asymmetries-language more on the left, spatial attention and
some emotions more on the right-are superimposed on that mostly sym¬
metrical design. It would not be surprising if the hemispheres were genetically
programmed with pretty much the same abilities, together with small biases
that lead each hemisphere to specialize in some talents while letting others
wither. With one hemisphere gone, the remaining one has to put all its capa¬
bilities to full use.

What happens when a child loses a part of the cortex in both hemispheres,
( so neither hemisphere can take over the job of the missing part in the other? If
cortical regions are interchangeable, plastic, and organized by the input, then
an intact part of the brain should take over the function of the missing parts.
The child may be a bit slower because he is working with less brain tissue, but
he should develop a full complement of human faculties. But that is not what

i seems to happen. Several decades ago, neurologists studied a boy who suffered
a temporary loss of oxygen to the brain and lost both the standard language
areas in the left hemisphere and their mirror images on the right. Though he
n was just ten days old when he sustained the damage, he grew into a child with
permanent difficulties in speaking and understanding. 73

That case study, like many in pediatric neurology, is not scientifically pure,
but recent studies on two other mental faculties echo the point that babies'
brains may be less plastic than many people think. The psychologist Martha
Farah and her collaborators recently reported the case of a sixteen-year-old
boy who contracted meningitis when he was one day old and suffered damage
to the visual cortex and to the bottom of the temporal lobes on both sides of
his brain." When adults sustain such damage, they lose the ability to recognize
faces and also have some trouble recognizing animals, though they often can
recognize words, tools, furniture, and other shapes. The boy had exactly this
syndrome. Though he grew up with normal verbal intelligence, he was utterly
incapable of recognizing faces. He could not even recognize pictures of the
cast of his favorite television show, Baywatch, which he had seen for an hour a
day for the preceding year and a half. Without the appropriate strips of brain,
sixteen years of seeing faces and plenty of available cortex were not enough to
give him the basic human ability to recognize other people by sight.

The neuroscientists Steven Anderson, Hannah and Antonio Damasio, and
their colleagues recently tested two young adults who had sustained damage to

The Slate's Last Stand / 99

their ventromedial and orbital prefrontal cortex when they were young chil¬
dren." These are the parts of the brain that sit above the eyes and are impor¬
tant for empathy, social skills, and self-management (as we know from Phineas
Gage, the railroad worker whose brain was impaled by a tamping iron). Both
children recovered from their injuries and grew up with average IQs in stable
homes with normal siblings and college-educated parents. If the brain were
really homogeneous and plastic, the healthy parts should have been shaped by
the normal social environment and taken over the functions of the damaged
parts. But that is not what happened with either of the children. One, who had
been run over by a car when she was fifteen months old, grew into an in¬
tractable child who ignored punishment and lied compulsively. As a teenager
she shoplifted, stole from her parents, failed to win friends, showed no empa¬
thy or remorse, and was dangerously uninterested in her own baby. The other
patient was a young man who had lost similar parts of his brain to a tumor
when he was three months old. He too grew up friendless, shiftless, thieving,
and hotheaded. Along with their bad behavior, both had trouble thinking
through simple moral problems, despite having IQs in the normal range. They
could not, for example, say what two people should do if they disagreed on
which TV channel to watch, or decide whether a man ought to steal a drug to
save his dying wife.

These cases do more than refute the doctrine of extreme plasticity. They
set a challenge for the genetics and neuroscience of the twenty-first century.
How does the genome tell a developing brain to differentiate into neural net¬
works that are prepared for such abstract computational problems as recog¬
nizing a face or thinking about the interests of other people?

THE BLANK SLATE has made its last stand, but, as we have seen, its latest sci¬
entific fortifications are illusory. The human genome may have a smaller num¬
ber of genes than biologists had previously estimated, but that only shows that
the number of genes in a genome has little to do with the complexity of the or¬
ganism. Connectionist networks may explain some of the building blocks of
cognition, but they are too underpowered to account for thought and lan¬
guage on their own; they must be innately engineered and assembled for the
tasks. Neural plasticity is not a magical protean power of the brain but a set of
tools that help turn megabytes of genome into terabytes of brain, that make
sensory cortex dovetail with its input, and that implement the process called
learning.

Therefore genomics, neural networks, and neural plasticity fit into the
picture that has emerged in recent decades of a complex human nature. It is
not, of course, & nature that is rigidly programmed, impervious to the input,
free of culture, or endowed with the minutiae of every concept and feeling. But
it is a nature that is rich enough to take on the demands of seeing, moving,

100 /The Blank Slate, the Noble Savage, and the Ghost in the Machine

planning, talking, staying alive, making sense of the environment, and negoti¬
ating the world of other people.

The aftermath of the Blank Slate's last stand is a good time to take stock of
the case for the alternative. Here is my summary of the evidence for a complex
human nature, some of it reiterating arguments from previous chapters, some
of it anticipating arguments in chapters to come.

Simple logic says there can be no learning without innate mechanisms to
do the learning. Those mechanisms must be powerful enough to account for
all the kinds of learning that humans accomplish. Learnability theory-the
mathematical analysis of how learning can work in principle-tells us there
are always an infinite number of generalizations that a learner can draw from
a finite set of inputs." The sentences heard by a child, for example, can be
grounds for repeating them back verbatim, producing any combination of
words with the same proportion of nouns to verbs, or analyzing the underly¬
ing grammar and producing sentences that conform to it. The sight of some¬
one washing dishes can, with equal logical justification, prompt a learner to try
to get dishes clean or to let warm water run over his fingers. A successful
learner, then, must be constrained to draw some conclusions from the input
and not others. Artificial intelligence reinforces this point. Computers and ro¬
bots programmed to do humanlike feats are invariably endowed with many
complex modules."

Evolutionary biology has shown that complex adaptations are ubiquitous
in the living world, and that natural selection is capable of evolving them, in¬
cluding complex cognitive and behavioral adaptations." The study of the be¬
havior of animals in their natural habitat shows that species differ innately
from one another in their drives and abilities, some of them (like celestial nav¬
igation and food caching) requiring complicated and specialized neural sys¬
tems." The study of humans from an evolutionary perspective has shown that
many psychological faculties (such as our hunger for fatty food, for social sta¬
tus, and for risky sexual liaisons ) are better adapted to the evolutionary de¬
mands of our ancestral environment than to the actual demands of the current
environment." Anthropological surveys have shown that hundreds of univer-
sals, pertaining to every aspect of experience, cut across the world's cultures."

Cognitive scientists have discovered that distinct kinds of representations
and processes are used in different domains of knowledge, such as words and
rules for language, the concept of an enduring object for understanding the
physical world, and a theory of mind for understanding other people.F Devel¬
opmental psychology has shown that these distinct modes of interpreting ex¬
perience come on line early in life: infants have a basic grasp of objects,
numbers, faces, tools, language, and other domains of human cognition."

The human genome contains an enormous amount of information, both
in the genes and in the noncoding regions, to guide the construction of a

The Slate's Last Stand / 101

complex organism. In a growing number of cases, particular genes can be tied
to aspects of cognition, language, and personality.” When psychological traits
vary, much of the variation comes from differences in genes: identical twins
are more similar than fraternal twins, and biological siblings are more similar
than adoptive siblings, whether reared together or apart. 85 A person's tempera¬
ment and personality emerge early in life and remain fairly constant through¬
out the lifespan. 86 And both personality and intelligence show few or no effects
of children's particular home environments within their culture: children
reared in the same family are similar mainly because of their shared genes."

Finally, neuroscience is showing that the brain's basic architecture devel¬
ops under genetic control. The importance oflearning and plasticity notwith¬
standing, brain systems show signs of innate specialization and cannot
arbitrarily substitute for one another."

In these three chapters I have given you a summary of the current scien¬
tific case for a complex human nature. The rest of the book is about its impli¬
cations.

7 02/The Blank Slate, the Noble Savage, and the Ghost in the Machine

PART II

FEAR AND LOATHING

B y the middle of the second half of the twentieth century, the ideals of
the social scientists of the first half had enjoyed a well-deserved victory.
Eugenics, Social Darwinism, colonial conquest, Dickensian policies to¬
ward children, overt expressions of racism and sexism among the educated,
and official discrimination against women and minorities had been eradi¬
cated, or at least were rapidly fading, from mainstream Western life.

At the same time, the doctrine of the Blank Slate, which had been blurred
with ideals of equality and progress for much of the century, was beginning to
show cracks. As the new sciences of human nature began to flourish, it was be¬
coming clear that thinking is a physical process, that people are not psycho¬
logical clones, that the sexes differ above the neck as well as below it, that the
human brain was not exempt from the process of evolution, and that people in
all cultures share mental traits that might be illuminated by new ideas in evo¬
lutionary biology.

These developments presented intellectuals with a choice. Cooler heads
could have explained that the discoveries were irrelevant to the political ideals
of equal opportunity and equal rights, which are moral doctrines on how we
ought to treat people rather than scientific hypotheses about what people are
like. Certainly it is wrong to enslave, oppress, discriminate against, or kill peo¬
ple regardless of any foreseeable datum or theory that a sane scientist would
offer.

But it was not a time for cool heads. Rather than detach the moral doc¬
trines from the scientific ones, which would ensure that the clock would not be
turned back no matter what came out of the lab and field, many intellectuals,
including some of the world's most famous scientists, made every effort to
connect the two. The discoveries about human nature were greeted with fear
and loathing because they were thought to threaten progressive ideals. All this
could be relegated to the history books were it not for the fact that these intel¬
lectuals, who once called themselves radicals, are now the establishment, and

Fear and Loathing / 103

the dread they sowed about human nature has taken root in modern intellec-
tuallife.

This part of the book is about the politically motivated reactions to the
new sciences of human nature. Though the opposition was originally a brain¬
child of the left, it is becoming common on the right, whose spokespeople are
fired up by some of the same moral objections. In Chapter 6 I recount the
shenanigans that erupted as a reaction to the new ideas about human nature.
In Chapter 7 I show how these reactions came from a moral imperative to up¬
hold the Blank Slate, the Noble Savage, and the Ghost in the Machine.

104 /Fear and Loathing

Chapter 6

Political Scientists

THE FIRST LECTURE I attended as a graduate student at Harvard in 1976 was
by the famous computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum. He was an early con¬
tributor to artificial intelligence (AI) and is best remembered for the program
Eliza, which fooled people into thinking that the computer was conversing
though it was just spouting canned repartee. Weizenbaum had just published
Computer Power and Human Reason , a critique of artificial intelligence and
computer models of cognition, praised as "the most important computer
book of the past decade.” I had misgivings about the book, which was short on
argument and long on sanctimony. (For example, he wrote that certain ideas
in artificial intelligence, such as a science-fiction proposal for a hybrid of nerv¬
ous systems and computers, were "simply obscene. These are [applications]
whose very contemplation ought to give rise to feelings of disgust in every civ¬
ilized person_One must wonder what must have happened to the pro¬

posers' perception of life, hence to their perceptions of themselves as part of
the continuum of life, that they can even think of such a thing.") i Still, noth¬
ing could have prepared me for the performance in store at the Science Center
that afternoon.

Weizenbaum discussed an AI program by the computer scientists Alan
Newell and Herbert Simon that relied on analogy: if it knew the solution to
one problem, it applied the solution to other problems with a similar logical
structure. This, Weizenbaum told us, was really designed to help the Pentagon
come up with counterinsurgency strategies in Vietnam. The Vietcong had
been said to "move in the jungle as fish move in water." If the program were fed
this information, he said, it could deduce that just as you can drain a pond to
expose the fish, you can denudethe jungle to expose the Vietcong. Turning to
research on speech recognition by computer, he said that the only conceivable
reason to study speech perception was to allow the CIA to monitor millions of
telephone conversations simultaneously, and he urged the students in the au¬
dience to boycott the topic. But, he added, it didn't really matter if we ignored

Political Scientists / 105

his advice because he was completely certain-there was not the slightest
doubt in his mind-that by the year 2000 we would all be dead. And with that
inspiring charge to the younger generation he ended the talk.

The rumors of our death turned out to be greatly exaggerated, and the
other prophecies of the afternoon fared no better. The use of analogy in rea¬
soning, far from being the work of the devil, is today a major research topic in
cognitive science and is widely considered a key to what makes us smart.
Speech-recognition software is routinely used in telephone information ser¬
vices and comes packaged with home computers, where it has been a godsend
for the disabled and for people with repetitive strain injuries. And Weizen-
baum's accusations stand as a reminder of the political paranoia and moral ex¬
hibitionism that characterized university life in the 1970s, the era in which the
current opposition to the sciences of human nature took shape.

It was not how I imagined that scholarly discourse would be conducted in
the Athens of America, but perhaps I should not have been surprised.
Throughout history, battles of opinion have been waged by noisy moralizing,
demonizing, hyperbole, and worse. Science was supposed to be a beachhead in
which ideas rather than people are attacked and in which verifiable facts are
separated from political opinions. But when science began to edge toward the
topic of human nature, onlookers reacted differently from how they would to
discoveries about, say, the origin of comets or the classification of lizards, and
scientists reverted to the moralistic mindset that comes so naturally to our
species.

Research on human nature would be controversial in any era, but the new
sciences picked a particularly bad decade in which to attract the spotlight. In
the 1970s many intellectuals had become political radicals. Marxism was cor¬
rect, liberalism was for wimps, and Marx had pronounced that "the ruling
ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.” The traditional
misgivings about human nature were folded into a hard-left ideology, and sci¬
entists who examined the human mind in a biological context were now con¬
sidered tools of a reactionary establishment. The critics announced they were
part ofa "radical science movement;'giving us a convenient label for the group.'

Weizenbaum was repelled by the attempt within artificial intelligence and
cognitive science to unify mind and mechanism, but the other sciences of
human nature evoked acrimony as well. In 1971 the psychologist Richard
Herrnstein published an article called "IQ" in the Atlantic Monthly? Herrn-
stein's argument, he was the first to point out, should have been banal. He
wrote that as social status becomes less strongly determined by arbitrary lega¬
cies such as race, parentage, and inherited wealth, it will become more strongly
determined by talent, especially (in a modern economy) intelligence. Since
differences in intelligence are partly inherited, and since intelligent people
tend to marry other intelligent people, when a society becomes more just it

706/Fear and Loathing

will also become more stratified along genetic lines. Smarter people will tend
to float into the higher strata, and their children will tend to stay there. The
basic argument should be banal because it is based on a mathematical neces¬
sity: as the proportion of variance in social status caused by nongenetic factors
goes down, the proportion caused by genetic factors has to go up. It could be
completely false only if there were no variation in social status based on intel¬
lectual talent (which would require that people not preferentially hire and
trade with the talented) or if there were no genetic variation in intelligence
(which would require that people be either blank slates or clones).

Herrnstein's argument does not imply that any differences in average in¬
telligence between races are innate (a distinct hypothesis that had been
broached by the psychologist Arthur Jensen two years earlier), 4 and he explic¬
itly denied that he was making such a claim. School desegregation was less
than a generation old, civil rights legislation less than a decade, so the differ¬
ences that had been documented in average IQ scores of blacks and whites'
could easily be explained by differences in opportunity. Indeed, to say that
Herrnstein's syllogism implied that black people would end up at the bottom
of a genetically stratified society was to add the gratuitous assumption that
blacks were on average genetically less intelligent, which Herrnstein took
pains to avoid.

Nonetheless, the influential psychiatrist Alvin Poussaint wrote that Herrn¬
stein “has become the enemy of black people and his pronouncements are a
threat to the survival of every black person in America." He asked rhetorically,
"Shall we carry banners for Herrnstein proclaiming his right to freedom of
speech?" Leaflets were handed out at Boston-area universities urging students
to "Fight Harvard Prof's Fascist Lies;' and Harvard Square was plastered with
his photograph above the caption wanted for racism and fivemisquotations
purportedly from his article. Herrnstein received a death threat and found that
he could no longer speak about his research specialty, learning in pigeons, be¬
cause wherever he went the lecture halls were filled with chanting mobs. At
Princeton, for example, students declared they would block the doors of the
auditorium to force him to answer questions on the IQ controversy. Several
lectures were canceled when the hosting universities said they could not guar¬
antee his safety. 5

The topic of innate differences among people has obvious political impli¬
cations, which I will examine in later chapters. But some scholars were in¬
censed by the seemingly warm-and-fuzzy claim that people have innate
commonalities. In the late 1960s the psychologist Paul Ekman discovered that
smiles, frowns, sneers, grimaces, and other facial expressions were displayed
and understood worldwide, even among foraging peoples with no prior con¬
tact with the West. These findings, he argued, vindicated two claims that Dar¬
win had made in his 1872 book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and

Political Scientists / 107

Animals. One was that humans had been endowed with emotional expressions
by the process of evolution; the other, radical in Darwin’s time, was that all
races had recently diverged from a common ancestor." Despite these uplifting
messages, Margaret Mead called Ekman’sresearch "outrageous;' "appalling;'
and "a disgrace"—and these were some ofthe milder responses.' At the annual
meeting of the American Anthropological Association, Alan Lomax Jr. rose
from the audience shouting that Ekman should not be allowed to speak be¬
cause his ideas were fascist. On another occasion an African American activist
accused him of racism for claiming that black facial expressions were no dif¬
ferent from white ones. (Sometimes you can't win.) And it was not just claims
about innate faculties in the human species that drew the radicals' ire, but
claims about innate faculties in any species. When the neuroscientist Torsten
Wiesel published his historic work with David Hubei showing that the visual
system ofcats is largely complete at birth, another neuroscientist angrily called
him a fascist and vowed to prove him wrong.

SOME OF THESEprotests were signs ofthe times and faded with the decline of
radical chic. But the reaction to two books on evolution continued for decades
and became part ofthe intellectual mainstream.

The first was E. O. Wilson’s Sociobiology, published in 1975. 8 Sociobiology
synthesized a vast literature on animal behavior using new ideas on natural se¬
lection from George Williams, William Hamilton, John Maynard Smith, and
Robert Trivers. It reviewed principles on the evolution of communication, al¬
truism, aggression, sex, and parenting, and applied them to the major taxa of
social animals such as insects, fishes, and birds. The twenty-seventh chapter
did the same for Homo sapiens, treating our species like another branch ofthe
animal kingdom. It included a review ofthe literature on universals and vari¬
ation among societies, a discussion of language and its effects on culture, and
the hypothesis that some universals (including the moral sense) may come
from a human nature shaped by natural selection. Wilson expressed the hope
that this idea might connect biology to the social sciences and philosophy, a
forerunner ofthe argument in his later book Consilience.

The first attack on Sociobiology zeroed in on its main heresy. In a book-
length critique, the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins defined "vulgar socio¬
biology" as the challenge to Durkheim’s and Kroeber's doctrine of the
superorganism: the belief that culture and society lived in a separate realm
from individual people and their thoughts and feelings. "Vulgar sociobiology,"
Sahlins wrote, "consists in the explication of human social behavior as the ex¬
pression of the needs and drives of the human organism, such propensities
having been constructed in human nature by biological evolution,"? Acknowl¬
edging fear of an incursion into his academic turf, he added, "The central in¬
tellectual problem does come down to the autonomy of culture and of the

108 / Fear and Loathing

study of culture. Sociobiology challenges the integrity of culture as a thing-in-
itself, as a distinctive and symbolic human creation."?

Sahlins's book was called The Use and Abuse of Biology. An example of the
alleged abuse was the idea that Hamilton's theory of inclusive fitness could
help explain the importance of family ties in human life. Hamilton had shown
how a tendency to make sacrifices for relatives could have evolved. Relatives
share genes, so any gene that nudges an organism to help a relative would be
indirectly helping a copy of itself. The gene will proliferate if the cost incurred
by the favor is less than the benefit conferred to the relative, discounted by the
degree of relatedness (one-half for a full sibling or offspring, one-eighth for a
first cousin, and so on). That can't be true, Sahlins wrote, because people in
most cultures don't have words for fractions. This leaves them unable to figure
out the coefficients of relatedness that would tell them which relatives to favor
and by how much. His objection is a textbook confusion of a proximate cause
with an ultimate cause. It is like saying that people can't possibly see in depth,
because most cultures haven't worked out the trigonometry that underlies
stereoscopic vision.

In any case, "vulgar" wasn't the half of it. Following a favorable review in
the New York Review of Books by the distinguished biologist C. H. W addington,
the "Sociobiology Study Group" (including two ofWilson's colleagues, the pa¬
leontologist Stephen Jay Gould and the geneticist Richard Lewontin) pub¬
lished a widely circulated philippic called "Against 'Sociobiology.'" After
lumping Wilson with proponents of eugenics. Social Darwinism, and Jensen's
hypothesis of innate racial differences in intelligence, the signatories wrote:

The reason for the survival of these recurrent determinist theories is
that they consistently tend to provide a genetic justification of the status
quo and of existing privileges for certain groups according to class, race,
or sex_These theories provided an important basis for the enact¬

ment of sterilization laws and restrictive immigration laws by the
United States between 1910 and 1930 and also for the eugenics policies
which led to the establishment of gas chambers in Nazi Germany.

. . . What Wilson's book illustrates to us is the enormous difficulty
in separating out not only the effects of environment (e.g., cultural
transmission) but also the personal and social class prejudices of the re¬
searcher. Wilson joins the long parade of biological determinists whose
work has served to buttress the institutions of their society by exonerat¬
ing them from responsibility for social problems. 11

They also accused Wilson of discussing “the salutary advantages of geno¬
cide" and of making "institutions such as slavery ... seem natural in human
societies because of their 'universal' existence in the biological kingdom." In

Political Scientists / 109

case the connection wasn't clear enough, one of the signatories wrote else¬
where that “in the last analysis it was sociobiological scholarship ... that pro¬
vided the conceptual framework by which eugenic theory was transformed
into genocidal practice» in Nazi Germany.'?

One can certainly find things to criticize in the final chapter of Sociobiol¬
ogy. We now know that some of Wilson’s universals are inaccurate or too
coarsely stated, and his claim that moral reasoning will someday be super¬
seded by evolutionary biology is surely wrong. But the criticisms in "Against
‘Sociobiology’ " were demonstrably false. Wilson was called a "determinist:'
someone who believes that human societies conform to a rigid genetic for¬
mula. But this is what he had written:

The first and most easily verifiable diagnostic trait [about human soci¬
eties] is statistical in nature. The parameters of social organization ...
vary far more among human populations than among those of any
other primate species.... Why are human societies this flexiblci':'

Similarly, Wilson was accused of believing that people are locked into castes
determined by their race, class, sex, and individual genome. But in fact he had
written that "there is little evidence of any hereditary solidification of status» u
and that "human populations are not very different from one another ge¬
netically"!" Moreover:

Human societies have effloresced to levels of extreme complexity be¬
cause their members have the intelligence and flexibility to play roles of
virtually any degree of specification, and to switch them as the occasion
demands. Modern man is an actor of many parts who may well be
stretched to his limit by the constantly shifting demands of the environ¬
ment."

As for the inevitability of aggression-another dangerous idea he was accused
of holding-what Wilson had written was that in the course of human evolu¬
tion "aggressiveness was constrained and the old forms of primate dominance
replaced by complex social skills:' 17 The accusation that Wilson (a lifelong lib¬
eral Democrat) was led by personal prejudice to defend racism, sexism, in¬
equality, slavery, and genocide was especially unfair-and irresponsible,
because Wilson became a target of vilification and harassment by people who
read the manifesto but not the book, is

At Harvard there were leaflets and teach-ins, a protester with a bullhorn
calling for Wilson's dismissal, and invasions of his classroom by slogan¬
shouting students. When he spoke at other universities, posters called him the
"Right-Wing Prophet of Patriarchy» and urged people to bring noisemakers to

11 0/Fear and Loathing

his lectures.'? Wilson was about to speak at a 1978 meeting of the American
Association for the Advancement of Science when a group of people carrying
placards (one with a swastika) rushed onto the stage chanting, «RacistWilson,
you can't hide, we charge you with genocide." One protester grabbed the mi¬
crophone and harangued the audience while another doused Wilson with a
pitcher of water.

As the notoriety of Sociobiology grew in the ensuing years, Hamilton and
Trivers, who had thought up many of the ideas, also became targets of pick-
eters, as did the anthropologists Irven DeVore and Lionel Tiger when they
tried to teach the ideas. The insinuation that Trivers was a tool of racism and
right-wing oppression was particularly galling because Trivers was himself a
political radical, a supporter of the Black Panthers, and a scholarly collabora¬
tor of Huey Newton's." Trivers had argued that sociobiology is, if anything, a
force for political progress. It is rooted in the insight that organisms did not
evolve to benefit their family, group, or species, because the individuals mak¬
ing up those groups have genetic conflicts of interest with one another and
would be selected to defend those interests. This immediately subverts the
comfortable belief that those in power rule for the good of all, and it throws a
spotlight on hidden actors in the social world, such as females and the younger
generation. Also, by finding an evolutionary basis for altruism, sociobiology
shows that a sense ofjustice has a deep foundation in people's minds and need
not run against our organic nature. And by showing that self-deception is
likely to evolve (because the best liar is the one who believes his own lies), so¬
ciobiology encourages self-scrutiny and helps undermine hypocrisy and cor¬
ruption." (I will return to the political beliefs of Trivers and other «Darwinian
leftists" in the chapter on politics.)

Trivers later wrote of the attacks on sociobiology, «Although some of the
attackers were prominent biologists, the attack seemed intellectually feeble and
lazy. Gross errors in logic were permitted as long as they appeared to give some
tactical advantage in the political struggle.... Because we were hirelings of the
dominant interests, said these fellow hirelings of the same interests, we were
their mouthpieces, employed to deepen the [deceptions] with which the ruling
elite retained their unjust advantage. Although it follows from evolutionary
reasoning that individuals will tend to argue in ways that are ultimately (some¬
times unconsciously) self-serving, it seemed a priori unlikely that evil should
reside so completely in one set of hirelings and virtue in the other."22

The «prominent biologists" that Trivers had in mind were Gould and
Lewontin, and together with the British neuroscientist Steven Rose they be¬
came the intellectual vanguard of the radical science movement. For twenty-
five years they have indefatigably fought a rearguard battle against behavioral
genetics, sociobiology (and later evolutionary psychology), and the neuro¬
science of politically sensitive topics such as sex differences and mental

Political Scientists / 111

illness." Other than Wilson, the major target of their attacks has been Richard
Dawkins. In his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, Dawkins covered many of the
same ideas as Wilson but concentrated on the logic of the new evolutionary
theories rather than the zoological details. He said almost nothing about hu¬
mans.

The radical scientists' case against Wilson and Dawkins can be summed
up in two words: "determinism" and "reductionism."24 Their writings are pep¬
pered with these words, used not in any technical sense but as vague terms of
abuse. For example, here are two representative passages in a book by Lewon-
tin. Rose, and the psychologist Leon Kamin with the defiantly Blank Slate title
Not in Our Genes:

Sociobiology is a reductionist, biological determinist explanation of
human existence. Its adherents claim ... that the details of present and
past social arrangements are the inevitable manifestations of the specific
action of genes."

[Reductionists] argue that the properties of a human society are ... no
more than the sums of the individual behaviors and tendencies of the
individual humans of which that society is composed. Societies are "ag¬
gressive" because the individuals who compose them are "aggressive,"
for instance."

The quotations from Wilson we saw earlier in the chapter show that he
never expressed anything close to these ridiculous beliefs, and neither, of
course, did Dawkins. For example, after discussing the tendency in mammals
for males to seek a greater number of sexual partners than females do,
Dawkins devoted a paragraph to human societies in which he wrote:

What this astonishing variety suggests is that man's way of life is largely
determined by culture rather than by genes. However, it is still possible
that human males in general have a tendency towards promiscuity, and
females a tendency to monogamy, as we would predict on evolutionary
grounds. Which ofthese tendencies wins in particular societies depends
on details of cultural circumstance, just as in different animal species it
depends on ecological details."

What exactly do "determinism" and "reductionism" mean? In the precise
sense in which mathematicians use the word, a "deterministic" system is one
whose states are caused by prior states with absolute certainty, rather than
probabilistically. Neither Dawkins nor any other sane biologist would ever
dream of proposing that human behavior is deterministic, as if people must

112/ Fear and Loathing

commit acts of promiscuity, aggression, or selfishness at every opportunity.
Among the radical scientists and the many intellectuals they have influenced,
"determinism» has taken on a meaning that is diametrically opposed to its true
meaning. The word is now used to refer to any claim that people have a ten-
clencyXa act in certain ways in certain circumstances. It is a sign of the tenacity
of the Blank Slate that a probability greater than zero is equated with a proba¬
bility of 100 percent. Zero innateness is the only acceptable belief, and all de¬
partures from it are treated as equivalent.

So much for genetic determinism. What about "reductionism» (a concept
we examined in Chapter 4) and the claim that Dawkins is "the most reduc¬
tionist of sociobiologists," one who believes that every trait has its own gene?
Lewontin, Rose, and Karnin try to educate their readers on how living things
really work according to their alternative to reductionism, which they call "di¬
alectical biology»:

Think, for example, of the baking of a cake: the taste of the product is
the result of a complex interaction of components-such as butter,
sugar, and flour-exposed for various periods to elevated temperatures;
it is not dissociable into such-or-such a percent of flour, such-or-such of
butter, etc., although each and every component ... has its contribution
to make to the final product. 28

I will let Dawkins comment:

When put like that, this dialectical biology seems to make a lot of sense.
Perhaps even / can be a dialectical biologist. Come to think of it, isn't
there something familiar about that cake?Yes, here it is, in a 1981 publi¬
cation by the most reductionist of sociobiologists:

((... If we follow a particular recipe, word for word, in a cookery
book, what finally emerges from the oven is a cake. We cannot now
break the cake into its component crumbs and say: this crumb corre¬
sponds to the first word in the recipe; this crumb corresponds to the sec¬
ond word in the recipe, etc. With minor exceptions such as the cherry on
top, there is no one-to-one mapping from words of recipe to (bits' of
cake. The whole recipe maps onto the whole cake,"

I am not, of course, interested in claiming priority for the cake....

But what I do hope is that this little coincidence may at least give Rose
and Lewontin pause. Could it be that their targets are not quite the
naively atomistic reductionists they would desperately like them to be?29

Indeed, the accusation of reductionism is topsy-turvy because Lewontin
.and Rose, in their own research, are card-carrying reductionist biologists who

Political Scientists / 113

explain phenomena at the level of genes and molecules. Dawkins, in contrast,
was trained as an ethologist and writes about the behavior of animals in their
natural habitat. Wilson, for his part, is a pioneer of research in ecology and a
passionate defender of the endangered field that molecular biologists dismis-
sively refer to as "birdsy-woodsy" biology.

All else having failed, Lewontin, Rose, and Kamin finally pinned a damn¬
ing quotation on Dawkins: "They [the genesJ control us, body and mind,'?"
That does sound pretty deterministic. But what the man wrote was, "They cre¬
ated us, body and mind:'which is very different." Lewontin has used the doc¬
tored quotation in five different places."

Is there any charitable explanation of these "gross errors:' as Trivers called
them? One possibility may be Dawkins's and Wilson's use of the expression "a
gene for X" in discussing the evolution of social behavior like altruism,
monogamy, and aggression. Lewontin, Rose, and Gould repeatedly pounce on
this language, which refers, they think, to a gene that always causes the behav¬
ior and that is the only cause of the behavior. But Dawkins made it clear that
the phrase refers to a gene that increases the probability of a behavior compared
with alternative genes at that locus. And that probability is an average com¬
puted over the other genes that have accompanied it over evolutionary time,
and over the environments that the organisms possessing the gene have lived
in. This nonreductionist, nondeterminist use of the phrase "a gene for X" is
routine among geneticists and evolutionary biologists because it is indispen¬
sable to what they do. Some behavior must be affected by some genes, or we
could never explain why lions act differently from lambs, why hens sit on their
eggs rather than eat them, why stags butt heads but gerbils don't, and so on.
The point of evolutionary biology is to explain how these animals ended up
with those genes, as opposed to genes with different effects. Now, a given gene
may not have the same effect in all environments, nor the same effect in all
genomes, but it has to have an average effect. That average is what natural se¬
lection selects (all things being equal), and that is all that the "for" means in “a
gene for X.” It is hard to believe that Gould and Lewontin, who are evolu¬
tionary biologists, could literally have been confused by this usage, but if they
were, it would explain twenty-five years of pointless attacks.

How low can one go? Ridiculing an opponent's sex life would seem to
come right out of a bad satirical novel on academic life. But Lewontin, Rose,
and Kamin bring up a suggestion by the sociologist Steven Goldberg that
women are skilled at manipulating others' emotions, and they comment,
"What a touching picture of Goldberg's vulnerability to seduction is thus re-
vealed!"33 Later they mention a chapter in Donald Symons's groundbreaking
book The Evolution of Human Sexuality which shows that in all societies, sex is
typically conceived of as a female service or favor. "In reading sociobiology:'
they comment, "one has the constant feeling of being a voyeur, peeping into

114/Fear and Loathing

the autobiographical memoirs of its proponents. "34 Rose was so pleased with
this joke that he repeated it fourteen years later in his book Lifelines: Biology
Beyond Determinism."

ANY hope that these tactics are a thing of the past was dashed by events in
the year 2000. Anthropologists have long been hostile to anyone who discusses
human aggression in a biological context. In 1976 the American Anthropolog¬
ical Association nearly passed a motion censuring Sociobiology and banning
two symposia on the topic, and in 1983 they did pass one decreeing that Derek
Freeman's Margaret Mead and Samoa was "poorly written, unscientific, irre¬
sponsible, and misleading.T" But that was mild compared with what was to
come.

In September 2000, the anthropologists Terence Turner and Leslie Spon-
sel sent the executives of the association a letter (which quickly proliferated
throughout cyberspace) warning of a scandal for anthropology that was soon
to be divulged in a book by the journalist Patrick Tierney." The alleged perpe¬
trators were the geneticist James Neel, a founder of the modern science of
human genetics, and the anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon, famous for his
thirty-year study of the Yanomamo people of the Amazon rainforest. Turner
and Sponsel wrote:

This nightmarish story-a real anthropological heart of darkness be¬
yond the imagining of even a Josef Conrad (though not, perhaps, a Josef
Mengele)-will be seen (rightly in our view) by the public, as well as
most anthropologists, as putting the whole discipline on trial. As an¬
other reader of the galleys put it, This book should shake anthropology
. to its very foundations. It should cause the field to understand how the
corrupt and depraved protagonists could have spread their poison for so
long while they were accorded great respect throughout the Western
World and generations of undergraduates received their lies as the in¬
troductory substance of anthropology. This should never be allowed to
happen again.

The accusations were truly shocking. Turner and Sponsel charged Neel
and Chagnon with deliberately infecting the Yanomamo with measles (which
is often fatal among indigenous peoples) and then withholding medical care in
order to test Neel's "eugenically slanted genetic theories,” According to Turner
and Sponsel's rendition ofthese theories, polygynous headmen in foraging so¬
cieties were biologically fitter than coddled Westerners because they possessed
"dominant genes" for "innate ability" that were selected when the headmen en¬
gaged in violent competition for wives. Neel believed, said Turner and Sponsel,
that «democracy, with its free breeding for the masses and its sentimental

Political Scientists I 115

supports for the weak;' is a mistake. They reasoned. “The political implication
ofthis fascistic eugenics is clearly that society should be reorganized into small
breeding isolates in which genetically superior males could emerge into dom¬
inance, eliminating or subordinating the male losers in the competition for
leadership and women, and amassing harems ofbrood females."

The accusations against Chagnon were just as lurid. In his books and pa¬
pers on the Yanornamo, Chagnon had documented their frequent warfare and
raiding, and had presented data suggesting that men who had participated in
a killing had more wives and offspring than those who had not." (The finding
is provocative because if that payoff was typical of the pre-state societies in
which humans evolved, the strategic use of violence would have been selected
over evolutionary time.) Turner and Sponsel accused him of fabricating his
data, of causing the violence among the Yanornamo (by sending them into a
frenzy over the pots and knives with which he paid his informants), and of
staging lethal fights for documentary films. Chagnon's portrayal of the
Yanornamo, they charged, had been used to justify an invasion of gold miners
into their territory, abetted by Chagnon's collusion with "sinister" Venezuelan
politicians. The Yanornamo have unquestionably been decimated by disease
and by the depredations of the miners, so to lay these tragedies and crimes at
Chagnon's feet is literally to accuse him of genocide. For good measure. Turner
and Sponsel added that Tierney's book contained "passing references to
Chagnon ... demanding that villagers bring him girls for sex."

Headlines such as "Scientist ’Killed Amazon Indians to Test Race Theory’"
soon appeared around the world, followed by an excerpt of Tierney's book in
The New Yorker and then the book itself, titled Darkness in El Dorado: How Sci¬
entist sand Journalists Devastated the Amazon. 39 Under pressure from the pub¬
lisher's libel lawyers, some ofthe more sensational accusations in the book had
been excised, watered down, or put in the mouths ofVenezuelan journalists or
untraceable informants. But the substance ofthe charges remained."

Turner and S onsel admitted that their charge against Neel "remains only
an inference in t present state of our knowledge: there is no ’smoking gun' in
the form of a wri ten text or recorded speech by Neel," That turned out to be
an understatem nt. Within days, scholars with direct knowledge of the
events-historia s, epidemiologists, anthropologists, and filmmakers-de-
molished the cha ges point by point."

Far from bei g a depraved eugenicist, James Neel (who died shortly before
the accusations c me out) was an honored and beloved scientist who had con¬
sistently attache deugenics, Indeed, he is often credited with purging human ge¬
netics of old eugenic theories and thereby making it a respectable science. The
cockamamie theory that Turner and Sponsel attributed to him was incoherent
on the face of it and scientifically illiterate (for example, they confused a "dom-

116/Fear and Loathing

inant gene" with a gene for dominance). In any case there is not the slightest ev¬
idence that Nee! held any belief close to it. Records show that Nee! and
Chagnonwere surprised by the measles epidemic already in progress and made
heroic efforts to contain it. The vaccine they administered, which Tierney had
charged was the source of the epidemic, has never caused contagious trans¬
mission of measles in the hundreds of millions of people all over the world who
have received it, and in all probability the efforts of Neel and Chagnon saved
hundreds ofYanomamo lives." Confronted with public statements from epi¬
demiologists refuting his claims.Tierney lamely said, "Experts I spoke to then
had very different opinions than the ones they are expressing in public now."43

Though no one can prove that Neel and Chagnon did not inadvertently
introduce the disease in other places by their very presence, the odds are
strongly against it. The Yanomamo, who are spread out over tens of thousands
of square miles, had many more contacts with other Europeans than they did
with Chagnon or Neel, because thousands of missionaries, traders, miners,
and adventurers move through the area. Indeed, Chagnon himself had docu¬
mented that a Catholic Salesian missionary was the likely source of an earlier
outbreak. Together with Chagnon's criticism of the mission for providing the
Yanomamo with shotguns, this earned him the missionaries' undying enmity.
Not coincidentally, most of Tierney's Yanomamo informants were associated
with the mission.

The specific accusations against Chagnon crumbled as quickly as those
against Neel. Chagnon, contrary to Tierney's charges, had not exaggerated
Yanornarno violence or ignored the rest of their lifestyle; in fact, he had metic¬
ulously described their techniques for conflict resolution." The suggestion
that Chagnon introduced them to violence is simply incredible. Raiding and
warfare among the Yanomamo have been described since the mid-1800s and
were documented throughout the first half of the twentieth century, long be¬
fore Chagnon set foot in the Amazon. (One revealing account was a first-
person narrative called Yanoama: The Story of Helena Valero, a Girl Kidnapped
by Amazonian Indians. )45 And Chagnon's main empirical claims have met the
gold standard of science: independent replication. In surveys of rates of death
by warfare in pre-state societies, Chagnon's estimates for the Yanomamo fall
well within the range, as we saw in the graph in Chapter 3. 46 Even his most
controversial claim, that killers had more wives and offspring, has been repli¬
cated in other groups, though there is controversy over the interpretation. It is
instructive to compare Tierney's summary of a book supposedly refuting
Chagnon with the author's own words. Tierney reports:

Among the [ivaro, head-hunting was a ritual obligation of all males and

a required male initiation for teenagers. There, too, most men died in

Political Scientists / 117

war. Among the [ivaro leaders, however, those who captured the most
heads had the fewest wives, and those who had the most wives captured
the fewest heads."

The author, the anthropologist Elsa Redmond, had actually written:

Yanomamo men who have killed tend to have more wives, which they
have acquired either by abducting them from raiding villages, or by the
usual marriage alliances in which they are considered more attractive as
mates. The same is true oflivaro war leaders, who might have four to six
wives; as a matter of fact, a great war leader on the Upano River in the
1930s by the name of Tuki or Jose Grande had eleven wives. Distin¬
guished warriors also have more offspring, due mainly to their greater
marital success."

Turner and Sponsel had long been among Chagnon's most vehement crit¬
ics (and, not coincidentally, major sources for Tierney's book, despite their
professed shock at learning of its contents). They are open about their ideo¬
logical agenda, which is to defend the doctrine of the Noble Savage. Sponsel
wrote that he is committed to "the anthropology ofpeace" in order to promote
a "more nonviolent and peaceful world;' which he believes is "latent in human
nature."? He is opposed to a "Darwinian emphasis on violence and competi¬
tion" and recently pronounced that "nonviolence and peace were likely the
norm throughout most ofhuman prehistory and that intrahuman killing was
probably rare.?" He even admits that much ofhis criticism ofChagnon comes
from «an almost automatic reaction against any biological explanation of
human behavior, the possibility of biological reductionism, and the associated
political implications,"!'

Also familiar from the radical science days is an irredentist leftism that
considers even moderate and liberal positions reactionary. According to Tier¬
ney, Neel «was convinced that democracy, with its free breeding for the masses
and its sentimental support for the weak, violated natural selection'Y and was
thus «a eugenic mistake." But in fact Neel was a political liberal who had
protested the diversion of money from poor children to research on aging that
he thought would benefit the affluent. He also advocated increasing invest¬
ment in prenatal care, medical care for children and adolescents, and univer¬
sal quality education.P As for Chagnon, Tierney calls him «a militant
anti-Communist and free-market advocate." His evidence? A quotation from
Turner (!) stating that Chagnon is «akind of right-wing character who has a
paranoid attitude on people he considers lefty." To explain how he came by
these right-wing leanings, Tierney informs readers that Chagnon grew up in a
part of rural Michigan "where differences were not welcomed, where xeno-

1 18/ Fear and Loathing

phobia, linked to anti-Communist feeling, ran high, and where Senator Joseph
McCarthy enjoyed strong support." Unaware of the irony, Tierney concludes
that Chagnon is an "offspring" of McCarthy who had "receiveda full portion
of [McCarthy's] spirit.” Chagnon, in fact, is a political moderate who had al¬
ways voted for Democrats.f

An autobiographical comment in Tierney's preface is revealing: "I gradu¬
ally changed from being an observer to being an advocate_traditional, ob¬

jective journalism was no longer an option for me."55 Tierney believes that
accounts of Yanomamo violence might be used by invaders to depict them as
primitive savages who should be removed or assimilated for their own good.
Defaming messengers like Chagnon is, in this view, an ennobling form of so¬
cial action and a step for the cultural survival of indigenous peoples (despite
the fact that Chagnon himself has repeatedly acted to protect the interests of
the Yanomamo).

The decimation of native Americans by European disease and genocide
over five hundred years is indeed one of the great crimes of history. But it is
bizarre to blame the crime on a handful of contemporary scientists struggling
to document their lifestyle before it vanishes forever under the pressures of as¬
similation. And it is a dangerous tactic. Surely indigenous peoples have a right
to survive in their lands whether or not they-like all human societies-are
prone to violence and warfare. Self-appointed "advocates" who link the sur¬
vival of native peoples to the doctrine of the Noble Savage paint themselves
into a terrible corner. When the facts show otherwise they either have inadver¬
tently weakened the case for native rights or must engage in any means neces¬
sary to suppress the facts.

No one should be surprised that claims about human nature are contro¬
versial. Obviously any such claim should be scrutinized and any logical and
empirical flaws pointed out, just as with any scientific hypothesis. But the crit¬
icism of the new sciences of human nature went well beyond ordinary schol¬
arly debate. It turned into harassment, slurs, misrepresentation, doctored
quotations, and, most recently, blood libel. I think there are two reasons for
this illiberal behavior.

One is that in the twentieth century the Blank Slate became a sacred doc¬
trine that, in the minds of its defenders, had to be either avowed with a perfect
faith or renounced in every aspect. Only such black-and-white thinking could
lead people to convert the idea that some aspects of behavior are innate into the
idea that all aspects of behavior are innate, or convert the proposal that genetic
traits influence human affairs into the idea that they determine human affairs.
Only if it is theologically necessary for 100 percent of the differences in intelli¬
gence to be caused by the environment could anyone be incensed over the math¬
ematical banality that as the proportion of variance due to nongenetic causes

Political Scientists / 119

goes down, the proportion due to genetic causes must go up. Only if the mind is
required to be a scraped tablet could anyone be outraged by the claim that
human nature makes us smile, rather than scowl, when we are pleased.

A second reason is that "radical" thinkers got trapped by their own moral¬
izing. Once they staked themselves to the lazy argument that racism, sexism,
war, and political inequality were factually incorrect because there is no such
thing as human nature (as opposed to being morally despicable regardless of
the details of human nature), every discovery about human nature was, by
their own reasoning, tantamount to saying that those scourges were not so bad
after all. That made it all the more pressing to discredit the heretics making the
discoveries. If ordinary standards of scientific argumentation were not doing
the trick, other tactics had to be brought in, because a greater good was at
stake.

120 /Fear and Loathing

Chapter 7

The Holy Trinity

BEHAVIORAL SCIENCE IS not for sissies. Researchers may wake up to dis¬
cover that they are despised public figures because of some area they have
chosen to explore or some datum they have stumbled upon. Findings on cer¬
tain topics-daycare, sexual behavior, childhood memories) the treatment of
substance abuse-may bring on vilification, harassment) intervention by
politicians) and physical assault.' Even a topic as innocuous as left-
handedness turns out to be booby-trapped. In 1991 the psychologists Stanley
Coren and Diane Halpern published statistics in a medical journal showing
that lefties on average had more prenatal and perinatal complications) are
victims of more accidents, and die younger than righties. They were soon
showered with abuse-including the threat of a lawsuit) numerous death
threats) and a ban on the topic in a scholarly journal-from enraged left¬
handers and their advocates."

. Are the dirty tricks of the preceding chapter just another example of peo¬
ple taking offense at claims about behavior that make them uncomfortable?
Or) as I have hinted, are they part of a systematic intellectual current: the at¬
tempt to safeguard the Blank Slatejthe Noble Savage,and the Ghost in the Ma¬
chine as a source of meaning and morality? The leading theoreticians of the
radical science movement deny that they believe in a blank slate, and it is only
fair that their positions be examined carefully. In addition) I will look at the at¬
tacks on the sciences of human nature that have come from their political op¬
posites, the contemporary right.

COULD THE RADICAL scientists really believe in the Blank Slate? The doc¬
trine might seem plausible to some of the scholars who live in a world of dis¬
embodied ideas. But could hardheaded boffins who live in a mechanistic
world of neurons and genes really think that the psyche soaks into the brain
from the surrounding culture? They deny it in the abstract, but when it comes
to specifics their position is plainly in the tradition of the tabula rasa social

The Holy Trinity / 121

science of the early twentieth century. Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Lewontin,
and the other signatories of the “Against ‘Sociobiology’ ” manifesto wrote:

We are not denying that there are genetic components to human behav¬
ior. But we suspect that human biological universals are to be discovered
more in the generalities of eating, excreting, and sleeping than in such
specific and highly variable habits as warfare, sexual exploitation of
women and the use of money as a medium of exchange.'

Note the tricky framing of the issue. The notion that money is a genetically
coded universal is so ridiculous (and not, incidentally, something Wilson ever
proposed) that any alternative has to be seen as more plausible than that. But
if we take the alternative on its own terms, rather than as one prong in a false
dichotomy, Gould and Lewontin seem to be saying that the genetic compo¬
nents of human behavior will be discovered primarily in the "generalities of
eating, excreting, and sleeping.') The rest of the slate, presumably, is blank.

This debating tactic-first deny the Blank Slate, then make it look plausi¬
ble by pitting it against a straw man-can be found elsewhere in the writings
of the radical scientists. Gould, for instance, writes:

Thus, my criticism of Wilson does not invoke a non-biological "envi¬
ronmentalism"; it merely pits the concept of biological potentiality, with
a brain capable of a full range of human behaviors and predisposed to
none, against the idea ofbiological determinism, with specific genes for
specific behavioral traits.'

The idea ofbiological determinism"-that genes cause behavior with 100
percent certainty-and the idea that every behavioral trait has its own gene,
are obviously daft (never mind that Wilson never embraced them). So Gould's
dichotomy would seem to leave "biological potentiality" as the only reasonable
choice. But what does that mean? The claim that the brain is "capable of a full
range of human behaviors" is almost a tautology: how could the brain not be
capable of a full range ofhuman behaviors? And the claim that the brain is not
predisposed to any human behavior is just a version of the Blank Slate. “Pre¬
disposed to none" literally means that all human behaviors have identical
probabilities of occurring. So if any person anywhere on the planet has ever
committed some act in some circumstance-abjuring food or sex, impaling
himself with spikes, killing her child-then the brain has no predisposition to
avoid that act as compared with the alternatives, such as enjoying food and
sex, protecting one's body, or cherishing one's child.

Lewontin, Rose, and Kamin also deny that they are saying that humans are
blank slates.’ But they grant only two concessions to human nature. The first

122/Fear and Loathing

comes not from an appeal to evidence or logic but from their politics: "If [a
blank slate] were the case, there could be no social evolution." Their support
for this "argument" consists of an appeal to the authority of Marx, whom they
quote as saying, “The materialist doctrine that men are the products of cir¬
cumstances and upbringing, and that, therefore, changed men are products of
other circumstances and changed upbringing, forgets that it is men that
change circumstances and that the educator himself needs educating."6 Their
own view is that “the only sensible thing to say about human nature is that it is
‘in’ that nature to construct its own history,"? The implication is that any other
statement about the psychological makeup of our species-about our capac¬
ity for language, our love of family, our sexual emotions, our typical fears, and
so on-is not "sensible."

Lewontin, Rose, and Kamin do make one concession to biology-not to
the organization of the mind and brain but to the size of the body. “Were
human beings only six inches tall there could be no human culture at all as we
understand it;' they note, because a Lilliputian could not control fire, break
rocks with a pick-axe, or carry a brain big enough to support language. It is
their only acknowledgment of the possibility that human biology affects
human social life.

Eight years later Lewontin reiterated this theory of what is innate in hu¬
mans: “The most important fact about human genes is that they help to make
us as big as we are and to have a central nervous system with as many-connec-
tions as it has." Once again, the rhetoric has to be unpacked with care. If we
take the sentence literally, Lewontin is referring only to "the most important
fact" about human genes. Then again, if we take it literally, the sentence is
meaningless. How could one ever rank-order the thousands of effects of the
genes, all necessary to our existence, and point to one or two at the top of the
list? Is our stature more important than the fact that we have a heart, or lungs,
or eyes? Is our synapse number more important than our sodium pumps,
without which our neurons would fill up with positive ions and shut down? So
taking the sentence literally is pointless. The only sensible reading, and the one
that fits in the context, is that these are the only important facts about human
genes for the human mind. The tens of thousands of genes that are expressed
primarily or exclusively in the brain do nothing important but give it lots of
connections; the pattern of connections and the organization of the brain (into
structures like the hippocampus, amygdala, hypothalamus, and a cerebral cor¬
tex divided into areas) are random, or might as well be. The genes do not give
the brain multiple memory systems, complicated visual and motor tracts, an
ability to learn a language, or a repertoire of emotions (or else the genes do
provide these faculties, but they are not "important").

In an update of John Watson's claim that he could turn any infant into a
"doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief, and yes, even beggar-man and thief,

The Holy Trinity / 123

regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of
his ancestors;'Lewontin wrote a book whose jacket precis claims that our ge¬
netic endowments confer a plasticity of psychic and physical development, so
that in the course of our lives, from conception to death, each of US, irrespec¬
tive of race, class, or sex, can develop virtually any identity that lies within the
human ambit,"? Watson admitted he was "going beyond my facts;' which was
forgivable because at the time he wrote there were no facts. But the declaration
on Lewontin's book that any individual can assume any identity (even grant¬
ing the equivalence of races, sexes, and classes), in defiance of six decades of re¬
search in behavioral genetics, is an avowal of faith of uncommon purity. And
in a passage that re-erects Durkheim's wall between the biological and the cul¬
tural, Lewontin concludes a-1992 book by writing that the genes "have been
replaced by an entirely new level of causation, that of social interaction with its
own laws and its own nature that can be understood and explored only
through that unique form of experience, social action,"!"

So while Gould, Lewontin, and Rose deny that they believe in a blank slate,
their concessions to evolution and genetics-that they let us eat, sleep, urinate,
defecate, grow bigger than a squirrel, and bring about social change-reveal
them to be empiricists more extreme than Locke himself, who at least recog¬
nized the need for an innate faculty of "understanding."

THE NOBLE SAVAGE, too, is a cherished doctrine among critics of the sci¬
ences ofhuman nature. In Sociobiology, Wilson mentioned that tribal warfare
was common in human prehistory. The against-sociobiologists declared that
this had been "strongly rebutted both on the basis of historical and anthropo¬
logical studies." I looked up these "studies," which were collected in Ashley
Montagu's Man and Aggression. In fact they were just hostile reviews of books
by the ethologist Konrad Lorenz, the playwright Robert Ardrey, and the nov¬
elist William Golding (author of Lord of the Flies). 11 Some of the criticisms
were, to be sure, deserved: Ardrey and Lorenz believed in archaic theories such
as that aggression was like the discharge of a hydraulic pressure and that evo¬
lution acted for the good of the species. But far stronger criticisms of Ardrey
and Lorenz had been made by the sociobiologists themselves. (On the second
page of The Selfish Gene, for example, Dawkins wrote, “The trouble with these
books is that the authors got it totally and utterly wrong.") In any case, the re¬
views contained virtually no data about tribal warfare. Nor did Montagu's
summary essay, which simply rehashed attacks on the concept of "instinct"
from decades of behaviorists. One of the only chapters with data "refuted"
Lorenz's claims about warfare and raiding in the Ute Indians by saying they
didn't do it any more than other native groups!

Twenty years later, Gould wrote that "Homo sapiens is not an evil or de¬
structive species:' His new argument comes from what he calls the Great

124/ Fear and Loathing

Asymmetry. It is '(an essential truth;' he writes, that «good and kind people
outnumber all others by thousands to one."12 Moreover, «we perform 10,000
acts of small and unrecorded kindness for each surpassingly rare, but sadly
balancing, moment ofcruelty"!’ The statistics making up this «essential truth”
are pulled out of the air and are certainly wrong: psychopaths, who are defi¬
nitely not «good and kind people;’ make up about three or four percent of the
male population, not several hundredths of a percent. 14 But even if we accept
the figures, the argument assumes that for a species to count as «evil and de¬
structive," it would have to be evil and destructive all the time, like a deranged
postal worker on a permanent rampage. It is precisely because one act can bal¬
ance ten thousand kind ones that we call it «evil."Also, does it make sense to
judge our entire species, as if we were standing en masse at the pearly gates?
The issue is not whether our species is «evil and destructive" but whether we
house evil and destructive motives, together with the beneficent and construc¬
tive ones. If we do, one can try to understand what they are and how they
work.

Gould has objected to any attempt to understand the motives for war in
the context of human evolution, because «each case of genocide can be
matched with numerous incidents of social beneficence; each murderous
band can be paired with a pacific clan.”15 Once again a ratio has been conjured
out of the blue; the data reviewed in Chapter 3 show that «pacific clans" either
do not exist or are considerably outnumbered by the «murderous bands,":"
But for Gould, such facts are beside the point, because he finds it necessary to
believe in the pacific clans on moral grounds. Only if humans lack any predis¬
position for good or evil or anything else, he suggests, do we have grounds for
opposing genocide. Here is how he imagines the position of the evolutionary
psychologists he disagrees with:

Perhaps the most popular of all explanations for our genocidal capacity
cites evolutionary biology as an unfortunate source-and as an ultimate
escape from full moral responsibility_A group devoid of xenopho¬

bia and unschooled in murder might invariably succumb to others re¬
plete with genes to encode a propensity for such categorization and
destruction. Chimpanzees, our closest relatives, will band together and
systematically kill the members of adjacent groups. Perhaps we are pro¬
grammed to act in such a manner as well. These grisly propensities once
promoted the survival of groups armed with nothing more destructive
than teeth and stones. In a world of nuclear bombs, such unchanged
(and perhaps unchangeable) inheritances may now spell our undoing
(or at least propagate our tragedies)-but we cannot be blamed for
these moral failings. Our accursed genes have made us creatures of the
night."

The Holy Trinity / 125

In this passage Gould presents a more-or-less reasonable summary of why sci¬
entists might think that human violence can be illuminated by evolution. But
then he casually slips in some outrageous non sequiturs ("an ultimate escape
from full moral responsibility:'“we cannot be blamed"), as ifthe scientists had
no choice but to believe those, too. He concludes his essay:

In 1525, thousands of German peasants were slaughtered .... and
Michelangelo worked on the Medici Chapel. ... Both sides of this di¬
chotomy represent our common, evolved humanity. Which, ultimately,
shall we choose? As to the potential path of genocide and destruction, let
us take this stand. It need not be. We can do otherwise, is

The implication is that anyone who believes that the causes of genocide might
be illuminated by an understanding of the evolved makeup of human beings
is in fact taking a stand in favor of genocide!

WHAT ABOUT THE third member of the trinity, the Ghost in the Machine?
The radical scientists are thoroughgoing materialists and could hardly believe
in an immaterial soul. But they are equally uncomfortable with any clearly
stated alternative, because it would cramp their political belief that we can col¬
lectively implement any social arrangement we choose. To update Ryle's de¬
scription of Descartes's dilemma: as men of scientific acumen they cannot but
endorse the claims of biology, yet as political men they cannot accept the dis¬
couraging rider to those claims, namely that human nature differs only in de¬
gree of complexity from clockwork.

Ordinarily it is not cricket to bring up the political beliefs of scholars in dis¬
cussing their scholarly arguments, but it is Lewontin and Rose who insist that
their scientific beliefs are inseparable from their political ones. Lewontin wrote
a book with the biologist Richard Levins called The Dialectical Biologist, which
they dedicated to Lriedrich Engels ("who got it wrong a lot ofthe time but got it
right where it counted"). In it they wrote, “As working scientists in the field of
evolutionary genetics and ecology, we have been attempting with some success
to guide our research by a conscious application of Marxist philosophy."? In
Not in Our Genes, Lewontin, Rose, and Kamin declared that they "share a com¬
mitment to the prospect of a more socially just-a socialist-society" and see
their "critical science as an integral part of the struggle to create that society'?"
At one point they frame their disagreement with "reductionism" as follows:

Against this economic reduction as the explanatory principle underly¬
ing all human behavior, we could counterpose the ... revolutionary
practitioners and theorists like Mao Tse-tung on the power of human
consciousness in both interpreting and changing the world, a power

126/Fear and Loathing

based on an understanding of the essential dialectical unity of the bio¬
logical and the social, not as two distinct spheres, or separable compo¬
nents of action, but as ontologically coterminous."

Lewontin and Rose’s commitment to the "dialectical" approach of Marx,
Engels, and Mao explains why they deny human nature and also deny that
they deny it. The very idea of a durable human nature that can be discussed
separately from its ever-changing interaction with the environment is, in
their view, a dull-witted mistake. The mistake lies not just in ignoring interac¬
tions with the environment-Lewontin and Rose already knocked over the
straw men who do that. The deeper mistake, as they see it, lies in trying to an¬
alyze behavior as an interaction between human nature and the human envi¬
ronment (including society) in the first place.P The very act of separating
them in one's mind, even for the purpose of figuring out how the two inter¬
act, "supposes the alienation of the organism and the environment." That
contradicts the principles of dialectical understanding, which says that the
two are "ontologically coterminous"-not just in the trivial sense that no or¬
ganism lives in a vacuum, but in the sense that they are inseparable in every
aspect of their being.

Since the dialectic between organism and environment constantly
changes over historical time, with neither one directly causing the other, or¬
ganisms can alter that dialectic. Thus Rose repeatedly counters the "determin-
ists" with the declaration “We have the ability to construct our own futures,
albeit not in circumstances of our own choosing"23-presumably echoing
Marx's statement that "men make their own history, but they do not make it
just as they please; they make it under circumstances directly encountered,
given and transmitted from the past.” But Rose never explains who the "we" is,
if not highly structured neural circuits, which must get that structure in part
from genes and evolution. We can call this doctrine the Pronoun in the Ma¬
chine.

Gould is not a doctrinarian like Rose and Lewontin, but he too uses the
first-person plural pronoun as if it somehow disproved the relevance of genes
and evolution to human affairs: "Which ... shall we choose? ... Let us take

this stand_We can do otherwise." And he too cites Marx's "wonderful

aphorism" about making our own history and believes that Marx vindicated
the concept of free will:

Marx himself had a much more subtle view than most of his contempo¬
raries of the differences between human and natural history. He under¬
stood that the evolution of consciousness, and the consequent
development of social and economic organization, introduced elements
of difference and volition that we usually label as "free will."24

The Holy Trinity / 127

Subtle indeed is the argument that explains free will in terms of its synonym
"volition» (with or without "elements ofdifference:' whatever that means) and
attributes it to the equally mysterious "evolution of consciousness," Basically,
Rose and Gould are struggling to make sense of the dichotomy they invented
between a naturally selected, genetically organized brain on one side and a de¬
sire for peace, justice, and equality on the other. In Part III we will see that the
dichotomy is a false one.

The doctrine of the Pronoun in the Machine is not a casual oversight in
the radical scientists' world view. It is consistent with their desire for radical
political change and their hostility to "bourgeois» democracy. (Lewontin re¬
peatedly uses "bourgeois» as an epithet.) If the "we»is truly unfettered by biol¬
ogy, then once "we» see the light we can carry out the vision of radical change
that we deem correct. But if the "we» is an imperfect product of evolution-
limited in knowledge and wisdom, tempted by status and power, and blinded
by self-deception and delusions of moral superiority-then «we»had better
think twice before constructing all that history. As the chapter on politics will
explain, constitutional democracy is based on a jaundiced theory of human
nature in which «we» are eternally vulnerable to arrogance and corruption.
The checks and balances of democratic institutions were explicitly designed to
stalemate the often dangerous ambitions of imperfect humans.

THE GHOST in the Machine, of course, is far dearer to the political right than
to the political left. In his book The New Know-Nothings: The Political Foes' of
the Scientific Study of Human Nature, the psychologist Morton Hunt has
shown that the foes include people on the left, people on the right, and a mot¬
ley collection of single-issue fanatics in between." So far I have discussed the
far-left outrage because it has been deployed in the battlefield of ideas in the
universities and the mainstream press. Those on the far right have also been
outraged, though until recently they have aimed at different targets and have
fought in different arenas.

The longest-standing right-wing opposition to the sciences of human na¬
ture comes from the religious sectors of the coalition, especially Christian fun¬
damentalism. Anyone who doesn't believe in evolution is certainly not going
to believe in the evolution of the mind, and anyone who believes in an imma¬
terial soul is certainly not going to believe that thought and feeling consist of
information processing in the tissues of the brain.

The religious opposition to evolution is fueled by several moral fears.
Most obviously, the fact of evolution challenges the literal truth of the creation
story in the Bible and thus the authority that religion draws from it. As one
creationist minister put it, «If the Bible gets it wrong in biology, then why
should I trust the Bible when it talks about morality and salvations":"

But the opposition to evolution goes beyond a desire to defend biblical lit -

128 / Fear and Loathing

eralism. Modern religious people may not believe in the literal truth of every
miracle narrated in the Bible, but they do believe that humans were designed
in God's image and placed on earth for a larger purpose-namely, to live a
moral life by following God's commandments. If humans are accidental prod¬
ucts of the mutation and selection of chemical replicators, they worry, moral¬
ity would have no foundation and we would be left mindlessly obeying
biological urges. One creationist, testifying to this danger in front of the U.S.
House Judiciary Committee, cited the lyrics of a rock song: «You and me baby
ain't nothin' but mammals / So let's do it like they do it on the Discovery Chan-
nel."27 After the 1999 lethal rampage by two teenagers at Columbine High
School in Colorado, Tom Delay, the Republican Majority Whip in the House
of Representatives, said that such violence is inevitable as long as «our school
systems teach children that they are nothing but glorified apes, evolutionized
out of some primordial soup ofmud:'28

The most damaging effect of the right-wing opposition to evolution is the
corruption of American science education by activists in the creationist move¬
ment. Until a Supreme Court decision in 1968, states were allowed to ban the
teaching of evolution outright. Since then, creationists have tried to hobble it
in ways that they hope will pass constitutional muster. These include removing
evolution from science proficiency standards, demanding disclaimers that it is
«only a theory," watering down the curriculum, and opposing textbooks with
good coverage of evolution or imposing ones with coverage of creationism. In
recent years the National Center for Science Education has learned of new in¬
stances of these tactics at a rate of about one a week, coming from forty states."

The religious right is discomfited not just by evolution but by neuro¬
science. By exorcising the ghost in the machine, brain science is undermining
two moral doctrines that depend on it. One is that every person has a soul,
which finds value, exercises free will, and is responsible for its choices. If be¬
havior is controlled instead by circuits in the brain that follow the laws of
chemistry, choice and value would be myths and the possibility of moral re¬
sponsibility would evaporate. As the creationist advocate John West put it, «If
human beings (and their beliefs) really are the mindless products of their ma¬
terial existence, then everything that gives meaning to human life-religion,
morality, beauty-is revealed to be without objective basis,"?"

The other moral doctrine (which is found in some, but not all, Christian
denominations) is that the soul enters the body at conception and leaves it at
death, thereby defining who is a person with a right to life. The doctrine makes
abortion, euthanasia, and the harvesting of stem cells from blastocysts equiv¬
alent to murder. It makes humans fundamentally different from animals. And
it makes human cloning a violation of the divine order. All this would seem to
be threatened by neuroscientists, who say that the self or the soul inheres in
neural activity that develops gradually in the brain of an embryo, that can be

The Holy Trinity /129

seen in the brains of animals, and that can break down piecemeal with aging
and disease. (We will return to this issue in Chapter 13.)

But the right-wing opposition to the sciences of human nature can no
longer be associated only with Bible-thumpers and televangelists. Today evolu¬
tion is being challenged by some of the most cerebral theorists in the formerly
secular neoconservative movement. They are embracing a hypothesis called In¬
telligent Design, originated by the biochemist Michael Behe." The molecular
machinery of cells cannot function in a simpler form, Behe argues, and there¬
fore it could not have evolved piecemeal by natural selection. Instead it must
have been conceived as a working invention by an intelligent designer. The de¬
signer could, in theory, have been an advanced alien from outer space, but every¬
one knows that the subtext of the theory is that it must have been God.

Biologists reject Behe's argument for a number of reasons." His specific
claims about the "irreducible complexity" of biochemistry are unproven or
just wrong. He takes every phenomenon whose evolutionary history has not
yet been figured out and chalks it up to design by default. When it comes to the
intelligent designer, Behe suddenly jettisons all scientific scruples and does not
question where the designer came from or how the designer works. And he ig¬
nores the overwhelming evidence that the process of evolution, far from being
intelligent and purposeful, is wasteful and cruel.

Nonetheless, Intelligent Design has been embraced by leading neoconser¬
vatives, including Irving Kristol. Robert Bork, Roger Kimball, and Gertrude
Himmelfarb. Other conservative intellectuals have also sympathized with cre¬
ationism for moral reasons, such as the law professor Philip Johnson, the
writer William F. Buckley,the columnist Tom Bethell, and, disconcertingly, the
bioethicist Leon Kass-chair of George W. Bush's new Council on Bioethics
and thus a shaper of the nation's policies on biology and medicine." A story
entitled "The Deniable Darwin" appeared, astonishingly, on the cover of Com¬
mentary, which means that a magazine that was once a leading forum for sec¬
ular Jewish intellectuals is now more skeptical of evolution than is the Pope!"

It is not clear whether these worldly thinkers are really convinced that
Darwinism is false or whether they think it is important for other people to
believe it is false. In a scene from Inherit the Wind, the play about the Scopes
Monkey Trial, the prosecutor and defense attorney (based on William Jen¬
nings Bryan and Clarence Darrow) are relaxing together after a day in court.
The prosecutor says of the Tennessee locals:

They're simple people, Henry; poor people. They work hard and they
need to believe in something, something beautiful. Why do you want to
take it away from them? It's all they have.

That is not far from the attitude of the neocons. Kristol has written:

130 I Fear and Loathing

If there is one indisputable fact about the human condition it is that no
community can survive if it is persuaded-or even if it suspects-that
its members are leading meaningless lives in a meaningless universe."

He spells out the moral corollary:

There are different kinds of truths for different kinds of people. There
are truths appropriate for children; truths that are appropriate for stu¬
dents; truths that are appropriate for educated adults; and truths that
are appropriate for highly educated adults, and the notion that there
should be one set of truths available to everyone is a modern democratic
fallacy. It doesn't work."

As the science writer Ronald Bailey observes, "Ironically, today many modern
conservatives fervently agree with Karl Marx that religion is 'the opium of the
people'; they add a heartfelt, 'Thank God!' ” 37

Many conservative intellectuals join fundamentalist Christians in deplor¬
ing neuroscience and evolutionary psychology, which they see as explaining
away the soul, eternal values, and free choice. Kass writes:

With science, the leading wing of modern rationalism, has come the
progressive demystification of the world. Falling in love, should it still
occur, is for the modern temper to be explained not by demonic posses¬
sion (Eros) born of the soul-smiting sight of the beautiful (Aphrodite)
but by a rise in the concentration of some still-to-be-identified polypep¬
tide hormone in the hypothalamus. The power of religious sensibilities
and understandings fades too. Even if it is true that the great majority of
Americans still profess a belief in God, He is for few of us a God before
whom one trembles in fear of judgment."

Similarly, the journalist Andrew Ferguson warns his readers that evolutionary
psychology "is sure to give you the creeps," because "whether behavior is
moral, whether it signifies virtue, is a judgment that the new science, and ma¬
terialism in general, cannot make,":'? The new sciences, he writes, claim that
people are nothing but "meat puppets," a frightening shift from the tradi¬
tional Iudeo-Christian view in which "human beings [are J persons from the
start, endowed with a soul, created by God, and infinitely precious.r'"

Even the left-baiting author Tom Wolfe, who admires neuroscience and
evolutionary psychology, worries about their moral implications. In his essay
"Sorry, but Your Soul Just Died:' he writes that when science has finally killed
the soul (“that last tefuge of values"), "the lurid carnival that will ensue may
make [Nietzsche's) phrase 'the total eclipse of all values' seem tame":

The Holy Trinity / 131

Meanwhile, the notion of a self-a self who exercises self-discipline,
postpones gratification, curbs the sexual appetite, stops short of aggres¬
sion and criminal behavior-a self who can become more intelligent
and lift itself to the very peaks of life by its own bootstraps through
study, practice, perseverance, and refusal to give up in the face of great
odds-this old-fashioned notion (what's a bootstrap, for God's sake?) of
success through enterprise and true grit is already slipping away, slip¬
ping away ... slipping away ... 41

"Where does that leave self-control?" he asks. "Where, indeed, if people believe
this ghostly self does not even exist, and brain imaging proves it, once and for
all?"42

An irony in the modern denial of human nature is that partisans at oppo¬
site extremes of the political spectrum, who ordinarily can't stand the sight of
each other, find themselves strange bedfellows. Recall how the signatories of
"Against 'Sociobiology' "wrote that theories like Wilson's "provided an impor¬
tant basis for ... the eugenics policies which led to the establishment of gas
chambers in Nazi Germany." In May 2001 the Education Committee of the
Louisiana House of Representatives resolved that "Adolf Hitler and others
have exploited the racist views of Darwin and those he influenced ... to jus¬
tify the annihilation of millions of purportedly racially inferior individuals. "43
The sponsor of the resolution (which was eventually defeated) cited in its de¬
fense a passage by Gould, which is not the first time that he has been cited
approvingly in creationist propaganda.f Though Gould has been a tireless op¬
ponent of creationism, he has been an equally tireless opponent of the idea
that evolution can explain mind and morality, and that is the implication of
Darwinism that creationists fear most.

The left and the right also agree that the new sciences of human nature
threaten the concept of moral responsibility. When Wilson suggested that in
humans, as in many other mammals, males have a greater desire for multiple
sexual partners than do females. Rose accused him of really saying:

Don't blame your mates for sleeping around, ladies, it's not their fault
they are genetically programmed."

Compare Tom Wolfe, tongue only partly in cheek:

The male of the human species is genetically hardwired to be polyga¬
mous, i.e., unfaithful to his legal mate. Any magazine-reading male gets
the picture soon enough. (Three million years of evolution made me do
it!)46

132/Fear and Loathing

On one wing we have Gould asking the rhetorical question:

Why do we want to fob off responsibility for our violence and sexism
upon our genes!"

And on the other wing we find Ferguson raising the same point:

The "scientific belief" would ... appear to be corrosive of any notion of
free will, personal responsibility, or universal morality."

For Rose and Gould the ghost in the machine is a “we” that can construct his¬
tory and change the world at will. For Kass, Wolfe, and Ferguson it is a “soul”
that makes moral judgments according to religious precepts. But all of them
see genetics, neuroscience, and evolution as threats to this irreducible locus of
free choice.

WHERE DOES THIS leave intellectual life today? The hostility to the sciences
of human nature from the religious right is likely to increase, but the influence
of the right will be felt more in direct appeals to politicians than from changes
in the intellectual climate. Any inroads of the religious right into mainstream
intellectual life will be limited by their opposition to the theory of evolution it¬
self. Whether it is known as creationism or by the euphemism Intelligent De¬
sign, a denial of the theory of natural selection will founder under the weight
of the mass of evidence that the theory is correct. How much additional dam¬
age the denial will do to science education and biomedical research before it
sinks is unknown.

The hostility from the radical left, on the other hand, has left a substantial
mark on modern intellectual life, because the so-called radical scientists are
now the establishment. I have met many social and cognitive scientists who
proudly say they have learned all their biology from Gould and Lewontin.”
Many intellectuals defer to Lewontin as the infallible pontiff of evolution and
genetics, and many philosophers of biology spent time as his apprentice. A
sneering review by Rose of every new book on human evolution or genetics
has become a fixture of British journalism. As for Gould, Isaac Asimov proba¬
bly did not intend the irony when he wrote in a book blurb that "Gould can do
no wrong:' but that is precisely the attitude of many journalists and social sci¬
entists. A recent article in New York magazine on the journalist Robert Wright
called him a “stalker" and a "young punk" with "penis envy" because he had the
temerity to criticize Gould on his logic and facts .50

In part the respect awarded to the radical scientists has been earned. Quite
aside from their scientific accomplishments, Lewontin is an incisive analyst on

The Holy Trinity / 133

many scientific and social issues, Gould has written hundreds of superb essays
• on natural history, and Rose wrote a fine book on the neuroscience of mem¬
ory, But they have also positioned themselves shrewdly on the intellectual
landscape. As the biologist John Alcock explains, "Stephen Jay Gould abhors
violence, he speaks out against sexism, he despises Nazis, he finds genocide
horrific, he is unfailingly on the side of the angels. Who can argue with such a
personi'"! This immunity from argument allowed the radical scientists' unfair
attacks on others to become part of the conventional wisdom.

Many writers today casually equate behavioral genetics with eugenics, as if
studying the genetic correlates of behavior were the same as coercing people in
their decisions about having children. Many equate evolutionary psychology
with Social Darwinism, as if studying our evolutionary roots were the same as
justifying the station of the poor. The confusions do not come only from the
scientifically illiterate but may be found in prestigious publications such as
Scientific American and Science." After Wilson argued in Consilience that divi¬
sions between fields of human knowledge were becoming obsolete, the histo¬
rian Tzvetan Todorov wrote sarcastically, “I have a proposal for Wilson's next
book ... [an] analysis of Social Darwinism, the doctrine that was adopted by
Hitler, and of the ways it differs from sociobiology.P' When the Human
Genome Project was completed in 2001, its leaders made a ritual denunciation
of "genetic determinism;' the belief-held by no one-that "all characteris¬
tics of the person are 'hard-wired' into our genome.T"

Even many scientists are perfectly content with the radicals' social con¬
structionism, not so much because they agree with it but because they are pre¬
occupied in their labs and need picketers outside their window like they need
another hole in the head. As the anthropologist John Tooby and the psycholo¬
gist Leda Cosmides note, the dogma that biology is intrinsically disconnected
from the human social order offers scientists "safe conduct across the politi¬
cized minefield of modern academic life.»55 As we shall see, even today people
who challenge the Blank Slate or the Noble Savage are still sometimes silenced
by demonstrators or denounced as Nazis. Even when such attacks are spo¬
radic, they create an atmosphere of intimidation that distorts scholarship far
and wide.

But the intellectual climate is showing signs of change. Ideas about human
nature, while still anathema to some academics and pundits, are beginning to
get a hearing. Scientists, artists, scholars in the humanities, legal theorists, and
thoughtful laypeople have expressed a thirst for the new insights about the
mind that have been coming out of the biological and cognitive sciences. And
the radical science movement, for all its rhetorical success, has turned out to be
an empirical wasteland. Twenty-five years of data have not been kind to its
predictions. Chimpanzees are not peaceful vegetarians, as Montagu claimed,
nor is the heritability of intelligence indistinguishable from zero, IQ a "reifica-

134 / Fear and Loathing

tion" unrelated to the brain, personality and social behavior without any ge¬
netic basis, gender differences a product only of "psychocultural expecta¬
tions:' or the number of murderous clans equal to the number of pacific
bands. 56 Today the idea of guiding scientific research by “a conscious applica¬
tion of Marxist philosophy" is just embarrassing, and as the evolutionary psy¬
chologist Martin Daly pointed out, "Sufficient research to fill a first issue of
Dialectical Biology has yet to materialize."?

In contrast, sociobiology did not, as Sahlins had predicted, turn out to
be a passing fad. The title of Alcock's 2001 book The Triumph of Sociobiol-
ogysays it all: in the study of animal behavior, no one even talks about "socio¬
biology" or "selfish genes" anymore, because the ideas are part Ind parcel
of the science." In the study of humans, there are major spheres of human
experience-beauty, motherhood, kinship, morality, cooperation, sexuality,
violence-in which evolutionary psychology provides the only coherent the¬
ory and has spawned vibrant new areas of empirical research. 59 Behavioral ge¬
netics has revivified the study of personality and will only expand with the
application ofknowledge from the Human Genome Project/" Cognitive neu¬
roscience will not shrink from applying its new tools to every aspect of mind
and behavior, including the emotionally and politically charged ones.

The question is not whether human nature will increasingly be explained
by the sciences of mind, brain, genes, and evolution, but what we are going to
do with the knowledge. What in fact are the implications for our ideals of
equality, progress, responsibility, and the worth of the person? The opponents
of the sciences of human nature from the left and the right are correct about
one thing: these are vital questions. But that is all the more reason that they be
confronted not with fear and loathing but with reason. That is the goal of the
next part of the book.

The Holy Trinity / 135

PART III

HUMAN NATURE WITH
A HUMAN FACE

W hen Galileo attracted the unwanted attention of the Inquisition in
1633, more was at stake than issues in astronomy. By stating that
the Earth revolved around the sun rather than vice versa, Galileo
was contradicting the literal truth of the Bible, such as the passage in which
Joshua issued the successful command “Sun, stand thou still." Worse, he was
challenging a theory of the moral order of the universe.

According to the theory, developed in medieval times, the sphere of the
moon divided the universe into an unchanging perfection in the heavens
above and a corrupt degeneration in the Earth below (hence Samuel Johnson’s
disclaimer that he could not "change sublunary nature"). Surrounding the
moon were spheres for the inner planets, the sun, the outer planets, and the
fixed stars, each cranked by a higher angel. And surrounding them all were
the heavens, home to God. Contained within the sphere of the moon, and thus
a little lower than the angels, were human souls, and then, in descending order,
human bodies, animals (in the order beasts, birds, fish, insects), then plants,
minerals, the inanimate elements, nine layers of devils, and finally, at the cen¬
ter of the Earth, Lucifer in hell. The universe was thus arranged in a hierarchy,
a Great Chain of Being.

The Great Chain was thick with moral implications. Our home, it was
thought, lay at the center of the universe, reflecting the importance of our ex¬
istence and behavior. People lived their lives in their proper station, (king,
duke, or peasant), and after death their souls rose to a higher place or sank to
a lower one. Everyone had to be mindful that the human abode was a humble
place in the scheme of things and that they must look up to catch a glimpse of
heavenly perfection. And in a world that seemed always to teeter on the brink
of famine and barbarism, the Great Chain offered the comfort of knowing that
the nature of things was orderly. If the planets wandered from their spheres,
chaos would break out, because everything was connected in the cosmic order.

Human Nature with a Human Face / 137

As Alexander Pope wrote, "From Nature's chain whatever link you strike, /
Tenth, or ten thousandth, breaks the chain alike,"!

None of this escaped Galileo as he was pounding away at his link. He knew
that he could not simply argue on empirical grounds that the division between
a corrupt Earth and the unchanging heavens was falsified by sunspots, novas,
and moons drifting across Jupiter. He also argued that the moral trappings of
the geocentric theory were as dubious as its empirical claims, so if the theory
turned out to be false, no one would be the worse. Here is Galilee's alter ego in
Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, wondering what is so great
about being invariant and inalterable:

For my part I consider the earth very noble and admirable precisely be¬
cause of the diverse alterations, changes, generations, etc. that occur in it
incessantly. If. not being subject to any changes, it were a vast desert of
sand or mountain of jasper, or if at the time of the flood the waters
which covered it had frozen, and it had remained an enormous globe of
ice where nothing was ever born or ever altered or changed, I should
deem it a useless lump in the universe, devoid of activity and. in a word,
superfluous and essentially nonexistent. This is exactly the difference
between a living animal and a dead one; and I say the same of the moon,
of Jupiter, and of all other world globes.

. . . Those who so greatly exalt incorruptibility, inalterability, et
cetera, are reduced to talking this way, I believe, by their great desire to
go on living, and by the terror they have of death. They do not reflect
that if men were immortal, they themselves would never have come into
the world. Such men really deserve to encounter a Medusa's head which
would transmute them into statues of jasper or diamond, and thus make
them more perfect than they are.?

Today we see things Galilee's way. It's hard for us to imagine why the
three-dimensional arrangement of rock and gas in space should have anything
to do with right and wrong or with the meaning and purpose of our lives. The
moral sensibilities of Galilee’s time eventually adjusted to the astronomical
facts, not just because they had to give a nod to reality but because the very
idea that morality has something to do with a Great Chain of Being was daffy
to begin with.

We are now living, I think, through a similar transition. The Blank Slate is
today's Great Chain of Being: a doctrine that is widely embraced as a rationale
for meaning and morality and that is under assault from the sciences of the
day. As in the century following Galilee, our moral sensibilities will adjust to
the biological facts, not only because facts are facts but because the moral cre¬
dentials of the Blank Slate are just as spurious.

13 8/Human Nature with a Human Face

This part of the book will show why a renewed conception of meaning
and morality will survive the demise of the Blank Slate. I am not, to say the
least, proposing a novel philosophy of life like the spiritual leader of some new
cult. The arguments I will layout have been around for centuries and have
been advanced by some of history's greatest thinkers. My goal is to put them
down in one place and connect them to the apparent moral challenges from
the sciences of human nature, to serve as a reminder of why the sciences will
not lead to a Nietzschean total eclipse of all values.

The anxiety about human nature can be boiled down to four fears:

• If people are innately different, oppression and discrimination would be
justified.

• If people are innately immoral, hopes to improve the human condition
would be futile.

• If people are products of biology, free will would be a myth and we could
no longer hold people responsible for their actions.

• If people are products of biology, life would have no higher meaning and
purpose.

Each will get a chapter. I will first explain the basis of the fear: which
claims about human nature are at stake, and why they are thought to have
treacherous implications. I will then show that in each case the logic is faulty;
the implications simply do not follow. But I will go farther than that. It's not
just that claims about human nature are less dangerous than many people
think. It's that the denial of human nature can be more dangerous than people
think. This makes it imperative to examine claims about human nature objec¬
tively, without putting a moral thumb on either side of the scale, and to figure
out how we can live with the claims should they turn out to be true.

Human Nature with a Human Face / 139

Chapter 8

The Fear of Inequality

THE GREATEST MORAL appeal of the doctrine of the Blank Slate comes from
a simple mathematical fact: zero equals zero. This allows the Blank Slate to
serve as a guarantor of political equality. Blank is blank, so if we are all blank
slates, the reasoning goes, we must all be equal. But if the slate of a newborn is
not blank, different babies could have different things inscribed on their slates.
Individuals, sexes, classes, and races might differ innately in their talents, abil¬
ities, interests, and inclinations. And that, it is thought, could lead to three evils.

The first is prejudice: if groups of people are biologically different, it could
be rational to discriminate against the members of some of the groups. The
second is Social Darwinism: if differences among groups in their station in
life-their income, status, and crime rate, for example-come from their in¬
nate constitutions, the differences cannot be blamed on discrimination, and
that makes it easy to blame the victim and tolerate inequality. The third is eu¬
genics: if people differ biologically in ways that other people value or dislike, it
would invite them to try to improve society by intervening biologically-by
encouraging or discouraging people's decisions to have children, by taking
that decision out of their hands, or by killing them outright. The Nazis carried
out the «final solution" because they thought Jews and other ethnic groups
were biologically inferior. The fear of the terrible consequences that might
arise from a discovery of innate differences has thus led many intellectuals to
insist that such differences do not exist-or even that human nature does not
exist, because if it did, innate differences would be possible.

I hope that once this line of reasoning is laid out, it will immediately set off
alarm bells. We should not concede that any foreseeable discovery about hu¬
mans could have such horrible implications. The problem is not with the pos¬
sibility that people might differ from one another, which is a factual question
that could turn out one way or the other. The problem is with the line of rea¬
soning that says that if people do turn out to be different, then discrimination,
oppression, or genocide would be OK after all. Fundamental values (such as

The Fear of Inequality / 141

equality and human rights) should not be held hostage to some factual con¬
jecture about blank slates that might be refuted tomorrow. In this chapter we
will see how these values might be put on a more secure foundation.

WHAT kinds of differences are there to worry about? The chapters on gender
and children will review the current evidence on differences between sexes and
individuals, together with their implications and non-implications. The goal of
this part of the chapter is more general: to layout the kinds of differences that
research could turn up over the long term, based on our understanding of
human evolution and genetics, and to layout the moral issues they raise.

This book is primarily about human nature-an endowment of cognitive
and emotional faculties that is universal to healthy members of Homo sapiens.
Samuel Johnson wrote, "We are all prompted by the same motives, all deceived
by the same fallacies, all animated by hope, obstructed by danger, entangled by
desire, and seduced by pleasure." The abundant evidence that we share a
human nature does not mean that the differences among individuals, races, or
sexes are also in our nature. Confucius could have been right when he wrote,
(Men's natures are alike; it is their habits that carry them far apart,'?

Modern biology tells us that the forces that make people alike are not the
same as the forces that make people different.' (Indeed, they tend to be stud¬
ied by different scientists: the similarities by evolutionary psychologists, the
differences by behavioral geneticists.) Natural selection works to homogenize
a species into a standard overall design by concentrating the effective genes-
the ones that build well-functioning organs-and winnowing out the ineffec¬
tive ones. When it comes to an explanation of what makes us tick, we are thus
birds of a feather. Just as we all have the same physical organs (two eyes, a liver,
a four-chambered heart), we have the same mental organs. This is most obvi¬
ous in the case oflanguage, where every neurologically intact child is equipped
to acquire any human language, but it is true of other parts of the mind as well.
Discarding the Blank Slate has thrown far more light on the psychological
unity of humankind than on any differences."

We are all pretty much alike, but we are not, of course, clones. Except in
the case of identical twins, each person is genetically unique. That is because
random mutations infiltrate the genome and take time to be eliminated, and
they are shuffled together in new combinations when individuals sexually re¬
produce. Natural selection tends to preserve some degree of genetic hetero¬
geneity at the microscopic level in the form of small, random variations
among proteins. That variation twiddles the combinations of an organism's
molecular locks and keeps its descendants one step ahead of the microscopic
germs that are constantly evolving to crack those locks.

All species harbor genetic variability, but Homo sapiens is among the less
variable ones. Geneticists call us a«small" species, which sounds like a bad joke

142/Human Nature with a Human Face

given that we have infested the planet like roaches. What they mean is that the
amount of genetic variation found among humans is what a biologist would
expect in a species with a small number of members." There are more genetic
differences among chimpanzees, for instance, than there are among humans,
even though we dwarf them in number. The reason is that our ancestors
passed through a population bottleneck fairly recently in our evolutionary
history (less than a hundred thousand years ago) and dwindled to a small
number of individuals with a correspondingly small amount of genetic varia¬
tion. The species survived and rebounded, and then underwent a population
explosion after the invention of agriculture about ten thousand years ago.
That explosion bred many copies of the genes that were around when we were
sparse in number; there has not been much time to accumulate many new ver¬
sions of the genes.

At various points after the bottleneck, differences between races emerged.
But the differences in skin and hair that are so obvious when we look at peo¬
ple of other races are really a trick played on our intuitions. Racial differences
are largely adaptations to climate. Skin pigment was a sunscreen for the trop¬
ics, eyelid folds were goggles for the tundra. The parts of the body that face the
elements are also the parts that face the eyes of other people, which fools them
into thinking that racial differences run deeper than they really do.” Working
in opposition to the adaptation to local climates, which makes groups differ¬
ent on the skin, is an evolutionary force that makes neighboring groups simi¬
lar inside. Rare genes can offer immunity to endemic diseases, so they get
sucked into one group from a neighboring group like ink on a blotter, even if
members of one group mate with members of the other infrequently." That is
why Jews, for example, tend to be genetically similar to their non-Jewish
neighbors all over the world, even though until recently they tended to marry
other Jews. As little as one conversion, affair, or rape involving a gentile in
every generation can be enough to blur genetic boundaries over time."

Taking all these processes into account, we get the following picture. Peo¬
ple are qualitatively the same but may differ quantitatively. The quantitative
differences are small in biological terms, and they are found to a far greater ex¬
tent among the individual members of an ethnic group or race than between
ethnic groups or races. These are reassuring findings. Any racist ideology that
holds that the members of an ethnic group are all alike, or that one ethnic
group differs fundamentally from another, is based on false assumptions
about our biology.

But biology does not let us off the hook entirely. Individuals are not ge¬
netically identical, and it is unlikely that the differences affect every part of
the body except the brain. And though genetic differences between races and
ethnic groups are much smaller than those among individuals, they are not
nonexistent (as we see in their ability to give rise to physical differences and to

The Fear of Inequality / 143

different susceptibilities to genetic diseases such as Tay-Sachs and sickle cell
anemia). Nowadays it is popular to say that races do not exist but are purely
social constructions. Though that is certainly true of bureaucratic pigeon¬
holes such as "colored;' "Hispanic;' "Asian/PacificIslander," and the one-drop
rule for being "black," it is an overstatement when it comes to human differ¬
ences in general. The biological anthropologist Vincent Sarich points out that
a race is just a very large and partly inbred family. Some racial distinctions
thus may have a degree of biological reality, even though they are not exact
boundaries between fixed categories. Humans, having recently evolved from
a single founder population, are all related, but Europeans, having mostly
bred with other Europeans for millennia, are on average more closely related
to other Europeans than they are to Africans or Asians, and vice versa. Be¬
cause oceans, deserts, and mountain ranges have prevented people from
choosing mates at random in the past, the large inbred families we call races
are still discernible, each with a somewhat different distribution of gene fre¬
quencies. In theory, some of the varying genes could affect personality or in¬
telligence (though any such differences would at most apply to averages, with
vast overlap between the group members). This is not to say that such genetic
differences are expected or that we have evidence for them, only that they are
biologically possible.

(My own view, incidentally, is that in the case of the most discussed racial
difference-the black-white IQ gap in the United States-the current evi¬
dence does not call for a genetic explanation. Thomas Sowellhas documented
that in most of the twentieth century and throughout the world, ethnic differ¬
ences in IQ were the rule, not the exception." Members of minority groups
who were out of the cultural mainstream commonly had average IQs that fell
below that of the majority, including immigrants to the United States from
southern and eastern Europe, the children of white mountaineers in the
United States, children who grew up on canal boats in Britain, and Gaelic-
speaking children in the Hebrides. The differences were at least as large as the
current black-white gap but disappeared within a few generations. For many
reasons, the experience of African Americans in the United States under slav¬
ery and segregation is not comparable to those of immigrants or rural iso¬
lates, and their transition to mainstream cultural patterns could easily take
longer.) 10

And then there are the sexes.Unlike ethnic groups and races, in which any
differences are biologically minor and haphazard, the two sexes differ in at
least one way that is major and systematic: they have different reproductive or¬
gans. On evolutionary grounds one might expect men and women to differ
somewhat in the neural systems that control how they use those organs-in
their s.exuality, parental instincts, and mating tactics. By the same logic, one
would expect them not to differ as much in the neural systems that deal with

144/Human Nature with a Human Face

the challenges both sexes face, such as those for general intelligence (as we will
see in the chapter on gender).

SO COULD DISCOVERIES in biology turn out to justify racism and sexism? Ab¬
solutely not! The case against bigotry is not a factual claim that humans are bi¬
ologically indistinguishable. It is a moral stance that condemns judging an
individual according to the average traits of certain groups to which the indi¬
vidual belongs. Enlightened societies choose to ignore race, sex, and ethnicity
in hiring, promotion, salary, school admissions, and the criminal justice system
because the alternative is morally repugnant. Discriminating against people on
the basis of race, sex, or ethnicity would be unfair, penalizing them for traits
over which they have no control. It would perpetuate the injustices of the past,
in which African Americans, women, and other groups were enslaved or op¬
pressed. It would rend society into hostile factions and could escalate into hor¬
rific persecution. But none of these arguments against discrimination depends
on whether groups of people are or are not genetically indistinguishable.

Far from being conducive to discrimination, a conception of human na¬
ture is the reason we oppose it. Here is where the distinction between innate
variation and innate universals is crucial. Regardless of IQ or physical strength
or any other trait that can vary, all humans can be assumed to have certain
traits in common. No one likes being enslaved. No one likes being humiliated.
No one likes being treated unfairly, that is, according to traits that the person
cannot control. The revulsion we feel toward discrimination and slavery
comes from a conviction that however much people vary on some traits, they
do not vary on these. This conviction contrasts, by the way, with the suppos¬
edly progressive doctrine that people have no inherent concerns, which im¬
plies that they could be conditioned to enjoy servitude or degradation.

The idea that political equality is a moral stance, not an empirical hypoth¬
esis, has been expressed by some of history's most famous exponents of equal¬
ity. The Declaration of Independence proclaims, "We hold these truths to be
self-evident; that all men are created equal.” The author, Thomas Jefferson,
made it clear that he was referring to an equality of rights, not a biological
sameness. For example, in an 1813 letter to John Adams he wrote: "I agree with
you that there is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are
virtue and talents_For experience proves, that the moral and physical qual¬

ities of man, whether good or evil, are transmissible in a certain degree from
father to son,"!' (The fact that the Declaration originally was applied only to
white men, and that Jefferson was far from an egalitarian in the conduct of his
own life, does not change the argument. Jefferson defended political equality
among white men-a novel idea in his time-even as he acknowledged innate
differences among white men.) Similarly, Abraham Lincoln thought that the
signers of the Declaration "did not mean to say all were equal in color, size,

The Fear of Inequality / 145

intellect, moral development or social capacity;’ but only in respect to "certain
inalienable rights."12

Some of the most influential contemporary thinkers about biology and
human nature have drawn the same distinction. Ernst Mayr, one ofthe found¬
ers of the modern theory of evolution, wisely anticipated nearly four decades
of debate when he wrote in 1963:

Equality in spite of evident nonidentity is a somewhat sophisticated
concept and requires a moral stature ofwhich many individuals seem to
be incapable. They rather deny human variability and equate equality
with identity. Or they claim that the human species is exceptional in the
organic world in that only morphological characters are controlled by
genes and all other traits ofthe mind or character are due to "condition¬
ing" or other nongenetic factors. Such authors conveniently ignore the
results of twin studies and of the genetic analysis of nonmorphological
traits in animals. An ideology based on such obviously wrong premises
can only lead to disaster. Its championship of human equality is based
on a claim of identity. As soon as it is proved that the latter does not
exist, the support of equality is likewise lost. 13

Noam Chomsky made the same point in an article entitled "Psychology and
Ideology." Though he disagreed with Herrnstein’s argument about IQ (dis¬
cussed in Chapter 6), he denied the popular charge that Herrnstein was a racist
and distanced himself from fellow radical scientists who were denouncing the
facts as dangerous:

A correlation between race and IQ (were this shown to exist) entails no
social consequences except in a racist society in which each individual is
assigned to a racial category and dealt with not as an individual in his
own right, but as a representative of this category. Herrnstein mentions
a possible correlation between height and IQ. Of what social impor¬
tance is that? None of course, since our society does not suffer under
discrimination by height. We do not insist on assigning each adult to the
category "below six feet in height" or "above six feet in height" when we
ask what sort of education he should receive or where he should live or
what work he should do. Rather, he is what he is, quite independent of
the mean IQ of people of his height category. In a nonracist society, the
category of race would be of no greater significance. The mean IQ of in¬
dividuals of a certain racial background is irrelevant to the situation of
a particular individual who is what he is....

It is, incidentally, surprising to me that so many commentators
should find it disturbing that IQ might be heritable, perhaps largely so.

146/Human Nature with a Human Face

Would it also be disturbing to discover that relative height or musical
talent or rank in running the one-hundred-yard dash is in part geneti¬
cally determined? Why should one have preconceptions one way or an¬
other about these questions, and how do the answers to them, whatever
they may be, relate either to serious scientific issues (in the present state
of our knowledge) or to social practice in a decent societyi!"

Some readers may not be reassured by this lofty stance. I f all ethnic groups
and both sexes were identical in all talents, then discrimination would simply
be self-defeating, and people would abandon it as soon as the facts were
known. But if they are not identical, it would be rational to take those differ¬
ences into account. After all, according to Bayes' theorem a decision maker
who needs to make a prediction (such as whether a person will succeed in a
profession) should factor in the prior probability, such as the base rate of suc¬
cess for people in that group. If races or sexes are different on average, racial
profiling or gender stereotyping would be actuarially sound, and it would be
naive to expect information about race and sex not to be used for prejudicial
ends. So a policy to treat people as individuals seems like a thin reed on which
to hang any hope of reducing discrimination.

An immediate reply to this worry is that the danger arises whether the dif¬
ferences between groups are genetic or environmental in origin. An average is
an average, and an actuarial decision maker should care only about what it is,
not what caused it.

Moreover, the fact that discrimination can be economically rational would
be truly dangerous only if our policies favored ruthless economic optimization
regardless of all other costs. But in fact we have many policies that allow moral
principles to trump economic efficiency. For example, it is illegal to sell your
vote, sell your organs, or sell your children, even though an economist could
argue that any voluntary exchange leaves both parties better off. These deci¬
sions come naturally in modern democracies, and we can just as resolutely
choose public policies and private mores that disallow race and gender preju¬
dice."

Moral and legal proscriptions are not the only way to reduce discrimina¬
tion in the face of possible group differences. The more information we have
about the qualifications of an individual, the less impact a race-wide or sex¬
wide average would have in any statistical decision concerning that person.
The best cure for discrimination, then, is more accurate and more extensive
testing of mental abilities, because it would provide so much predictive infor¬
mation about an individual that no one would be tempted to factor in race or
gender. (This, however, is an idea with no political future.)

Discrimination-in the sense of using a statistically predictive trait of
an individual's group to make a decision about the individual-is not always

The Fear of Inequality / 147

immoral, or at least we don't always treat it as immoral. To predict someone's
behavior perfectly we would need an X-ray machine for the soul. Even pre¬
dicting someone's behavior with the tools we do have-such as tests, inter¬
views, background checks, and recommendations-would require unlimited
resources if we were to use them to the fullest, Decisions that have to be made
with finite time and resources, and which have high costs for certain kinds of
errors, must use some trait as abasis forjudging a person. And that necessarily
judges the person according to a stereotype.

In some cases the overlap between two groups is so small that we feel com¬
fortable discriminating against one of the groups absolutely. For example, no
one objects to keeping chimpanzees out of our schools, even though it is con¬
ceivable that if we tested every chimp on the planet we might find one that
could learn to read and write. We apply a speciesist stereotype that chimps
cannot profit from a human education, figuring that the odds of finding an ex¬
ception do not outweigh the costs of examining every last one.

In more realistic circumstances we have to decide on a case-by-case basis
whether the discrimination isjustifiable. Denying driving and voting rights to
young teenagers is a form of age discrimination that is unfair to responsible
teens. But we are not willing to pay either the financial costs of developing a test
for psychological maturity or the moral costs of classification errors, such as
teens wrapping their cars around trees. Almost everyone is appalled by racial
profiling-pulling over motorists for "driving while black.” But after the 2001
terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, about half of
Americans polled said they were not opposed to ethnic profiling-scrutinizing
passengers for «flyingwhile Arab." i6 People who distinguish the two must rea¬
son that the benefits of catching a marijuana dealer do not outweigh the harm
done to innocent black drivers, but the benefits of stopping a suicide hijacker
do outweigh the harm done to innocent Arab passengers. Cost-benefit analy¬
ses are also sometimes used to justify racial preferences: the benefits of racially
diverse workplaces and campuses are thought to outweigh the costs of dis¬
criminating against whites.

The possibility that men and women are not the same in all respects also
presents policymakers with choices. It would be reprehensible for a bank to
hire a man over a woman as a manager for the reason that he is less likely to
quit after having a child. Would it also be reprehensible for a couple to hire a
woman over a man as a nanny for their daughter because she is less likely to
sexually abuse the child? Most people believe that the punishment for a given
crime should be the same regardless of who commits it. But knowing the typ¬
ical sexual emotions of the two sexes, should we apply the same punishment to
a man who seduces a sixteen-year-old girl and to a woman who seduces a
sixteen-year-old boy?

These are some of the issues that face the people of a democracy in decid-

148/Human Nature with a Human Face

ing what to do about discrimination. The point is not that group differences
may neverbe used as a basis for discrimination. The point is that they do not
have to be used that way, and sometimes we can decide on moral grounds that
they must not be used that way.

THE BLANK SLATE, then, is not necessary to combat racism and sexism. Nor
is it necessary to combat Social Darwinism, the belief that the rich and the
poor deserve their status and so we must abandon any principle of economic
justice in favor of extreme laissez-faire policies.

Because of a fear of Social Darwinism, the idea that class has anything to do
with genes is treated by modern intellectuals like plutonium, even though it is
hard to imagine how it could not be true in part. To adapt an example from the
philosopher Robert Nozick, suppose a million people are willing to pay ten dol¬
lars to hear Pavarotti sing and are unwilling to pay ten dollars to hear me sing, in
part because of genetic differences between us. Pavarotti will be ten million dol¬
lars richer and will live in an economic stratum that my genes keep me out of,
even in a society that is totally fair.i? It is a brute fact that greater rewards will go
to people with greater inborn talent if other people are willing to pay more for
the fruits of those talents. The only way that cannot happen is if people are
locked into arbitrary castes, if all economic transactions are controlled by the
state, or if there is no such thing as inborn talent because we are blank slates.

A surprising number of intellectuals, particularly on the left, do deny that
there is such a thing as inborn talent, especially intelligence. Stephen Jay
Gould's 1981 bestseller The Mismeasure of Man was written to debunk"the ab¬
straction of intelligence as a single entity, its location within the brain, its
quantification as one number for each individual, and the use of these num¬
bers to rank people in a single series of worthiness, invariably to find that op¬
pressed and disadvantaged groups-races, classes, or sexes-are innately
inferior and deserve their status,":" The philosopher Hilary Putnam argued
that the concept of intelligence is part of a social theory called "elitism" that is
specific to capitalist societies:

Under a less competitive form of social organization, the theory of elit¬
ism might well be replaced by a different theory-the theory of egalitar¬
ianism. This theory might say that ordinary people can do anything that
is in their interest and do it well when (1) they are highly motivated, and
(2) they work collectively.'?

In other words, any of us could become a Richard Feynman or a Tiger Woods
if only we were highly enough motivated and worked collectively.

I find it truly surreal to read academics denying the existence of intelli¬
gence. Academics are obsessed with intelligence. They discuss it endlessly in

The Fear of Inequality / 149

considering student admissions, in hiring faculty and staff, and especially in
their gossip about one another. Nor can citizens or policymakers ignore the
concept, regardless of their politics. People who say that IQ is meaningless will
quickly invoke it when the discussion turns to executing a murderer with an
IQ of 64, removing lead paint that lowers a child's IQ by five points, or the
presidential qualifications of George W. Bush. In any case, there is now ample
evidence that intelligence is a stable property of an individual, that it can be
linked to features of the brain (including overall size, amount of gray matter in
the frontal lobes, speed of neural conduction, and metabolism of cerebral glu¬
cose), that it is partly heritable among individuals, and that it predicts some of
the v.ariation in life outcomes such as income and social status."

The existence of inborn talents, however, does not call for Social Darwin¬
ism. The anxiety that one must lead to the other is based on two fallacies. The
first is an all-or-none mentality that often infects discussions of the social im¬
plications of genetics. The likelihood that inborn differences are one contribu¬
tor to social status does not mean that it is the only contributor. The other ones
include sheer luck, inherited wealth, race and class prejudice, unequal oppor¬
tunity (such as in schooling and connections), and cultural capital: habits and
values that promote economic success. Acknowledging that talent matters
doesn't mean that prejudice and unequal opportunity do not matter.

But more important, even if inherited talents can lead to socioeconomic
success, it doesn't mean that the success is desen’ed in a moral sense. Social
Darwinism is based on Spencer's assumption that we can look to evolution to
discover what is right-that «good" can be boiled down to «evolutionarily suc¬
cessful." This lives in infamy as a reference case for the «naturalistic fallacy":
the belief that what happens in nature is good. (Spencer also confused people's
social success-their wealth, power, and status-with their evolutionary suc¬
cess, the number of their viable descendants.) The naturalistic fallacy was
named by the moral philosopher G. E. Moore in his 1903 Principia Ethica, the
book that killed Spencer's ethics." Moore applied "Hume's Guillotine;' the ar¬
gument that no matter how convincingly you show that something is true, it
never follows logically that it ought to be true. Moore noted that it is sensible
to ask, «This conduct is more evolutionarily successful, but is it good?" The
mere fact that the question makes sense shows that evolutionary success and
goodness are not the same thing.

Can one really reconcile biological differences with a concept of social jus¬
tice? Absolutely. In his famous theory of justice, the philosopher John Rawls
asks us to imagine a social contract drawn up by self-interested agents negoti¬
ating under a veil of ignorance, unaware of the talents or status they will in¬
herit at birth-ghosts ignorant of the machines they will haunt. He argues that
a just society is one that these disembodied souls would agree to be born into,
knowing that they might be dealt a lousy social or genetic hand." If you agree

750/Human Nature with a Human Face

that this is a reasonable conception of justice, and that the agents would insist
on a broad social safety net and redistributive taxation (short of eliminating
incentives that make everyone better off), then you can justify compensatory
social policies even if you think differences in social status are 100 percent ge¬
netic. The policies would be, quite literally, a matter of justice, not a conse¬
quence of the indistinguishability of individuals.

Indeed, the existence of innate differences in ability makes Rawls's con¬
ception of social justice especially acute and eternally relevant. If we were
blank slates, and if a society ever did eliminate discrimination, the poorest
could be said to deserve their station because they must have chosen to do less
with their standard-issue talents. But if people differ in talents, people might
find themselves in poverty in a nonprejudiced society even if they applied
themselves to the fullest. That is an injustice that, a Rawlsian would argue,
ought to be rectified, and it would be overlooked if we didn't recognize that
people differ in their abilities.

SOME PEOPLE HAVE suggested to me that these grandiloquent arguments are
just too fancy for the dangerous world we live in. Granted, there is evidence
that people are different, but since data in the social sciences are never perfect,
and since a conclusion of inequality might be used to the worst ends by bigots
or Social Darwinists, shouldn't we err on the side of caution and stick with the
null hypothesis that people are identical? Some believe that even if we were
certain that people differ genetically, we might still want to promulgate the fic¬
tion that they are the same, because it is less open to abuse.

This argument is based on the fallacy that the Blank Slate has nothing but
good moral implications and a theory of human nature nothing but bad
ones. In the case of human differences, as in the case of human universals, the
dangers go both ways. If people in different stations are mistakenly thought
to differ in their inherent ability, we might overlook discrimination and un¬
equal opportunity. In Darwin's words, “If the misery of the poor be caused
not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin." But if peo¬
ple in different stations are mistakenly thought to be the same, then we might
envy them the rewards they've earned fair and square and might implement
coercive policies to hammer down the nails that stick up. The economist
Friedrich Hayek wrote, “It is just not true that humans are born equal; ... if
we treat them equally, the result must be inequality in their actual posi¬
tion; ... [thus] the only way to place them in an equal position would be
to treat them differently. Equality before the law and material equality are,
therefore, not only different but in conflict with each other."?" The phi¬
losophers Isaiah Berlin, Karl Popper, and Robert Nozick have made similar
points.

Unequal treatment in the name of equality can take many forms. Some

The Fear of Inequality / 151

forms have both defenders and detractors, such as soak-the-rich taxation, heavy
estate taxes, streaming by age rather than ability in schools, quotas and pref¬
erences that favor certain races or regions, and prohibitions against private
medical care or other voluntary transactions. But some can be downright dan¬
gerous. If people are assumed to start out identical but some end up wealthier
than others, observers may conclude that the wealthier ones must be more ra¬
pacious. And as the diagnosis slides from talent to sin, the remedy can shift from
redistribution to vengeance. Many atrocities ofthe twentieth century were com¬
mitted in the name of egalitarianism, targeting people whose success was taken
as evidence of their criminality. The kulaks (“bourgeois peasants") were exter¬
minated by Lenin and Stalin in the Soviet Union; teachers, former landlords,
and "rich peasants" were humiliated, tortured, and murdered during China's
Cultural Revolution; city dwellers and literate professionals were worked to
death or executed during the reign ofthe Khmer Rouge in Cambodia." Edu¬
cated and entrepreneurial minorities who have prospered in their adopted re¬
gions, such as the Indians in East Africa and Oceania, the Ibos in Nigeria, the
Armenians in Turkey, the Chinese in Indonesia and Malaysia, and the Jews al¬
most everywhere, have been expelled from their homes or killed in pogroms be¬
cause their visibly successful members were seen as parasites and exploiters."

A nonblank slate means that a tradeoff between freedom and material
equality is inherent to all political systems. The major political philosophies
can be defined by how they deal with the tradeoff. The Social Darwinist right
places no value on equality; the totalitarian left places no value on freedom.
The Rawlsian left sacrifices some freedom for equality; the libertarian right
sacrifices some equality for freedom. While reasonable people may disagree
about the best tradeoff, it is unreasonable to pretend there /sno tradeoff. And
that in turn means that any discovery of innate differences among individuals
is not forbidden knowledge to be suppressed but information that might help
us decide on these tradeoffs in an intelligent and humane manner.

THE SPECTER of eugenics can be disposed of as easily as the specters of dis¬
crimination and Social Darwinism. Once again, the key is to distinguish bio¬
logical facts from human values.

If people differ genetically in intelligence and character, could we selec¬
tively breed for smarter and nicer people? Possibly, though the intricacies of
genetics and development would make it far harder than the fans of eugenics
imagined. Selective breeding is straightforward for genes with additive ef-
fects-that is, genes that have the same impact regardless ofthe other genes in
the genome. But some traits, such as scientific genius, athletic virtuosity, and
musical giftedness, are what behavioral geneticists call emergenic: they mate¬
rialize only with certain combinations of genes and therefore don't "breed
true.?" Moreover, a given gene can lead to different behavior in different en-

152/Human Nature with a Human Face

vironments. When the biochemist (and radicalscientist) George Wald was
solicited for a semen sample by William Shockley's sperm bank for Nobel
Prize-winning scientists, he replied, "If you want sperm that produces Nobel
Prize winners you should be contacting people like my father, a poor immi¬
grant tailor. What have my sperm given the world? Two guitarists! "27

Whether or not we can breed for certain traits, should we do it? It would
require a government wise enough to know which traits to select, knowledge¬
able enough to know how to implement the breeding, and intrusive enough to
encourage or coerce people's most intimate decisions. Few people in a democ¬
racy would grant their government that kind of power even if it did promise a
better society in the future. The costs in freedom to individuals and in possi¬
ble abuse by authorities are unacceptable.

Contrary to the belief spread by the radical scientists, eugenics for much
of the twentieth century was a favorite cause of the left, not the right." It was
championed by many progressives, liberals, and socialists, including Theodore
Roosevelt, H. G. Wells, Emma Goldman, George Bernard Shaw, Harold Laski,
John Maynard Keynes, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Margaret Sanger, and the
Marxist biologists J.B.S. Haldane and Hermann Muller. It's not hard to see
why the sides lined up this way. Conservative Catholics and Bible Belt Protes¬
tants hated eugenics because it was an attempt by intellectual and scientific
elites to play God. Progressives loved eugenics because it was on the side of re¬
form rather than the status quo, activism rather than laissez-faire, and social
responsibility rather than selfishness. Moreover, they were comfortable ex¬
panding state intervention in order to bring about a social goal. Most aban¬
doned eugenics only when they saw how it led to forced sterilizations in the
United States and Western Europe and, later, to the policies of Nazi Germany.
The history of eugenics is one of many cases in which the moral problems
posed by human nature cannot be folded into familiar left-right debates but
have to be analyzed afresh in terms of the conflictingvalues at stake.

THE MOST SICKENING associations of a biological conception of human na¬
ture are the ones to Nazism. Though the opposition to the idea of a human na¬
ture began decades earlier, historians agree that bitter memories of the
Holocaust were the main reason that human nature became taboo in intellec-
tuallife after World War II.

Hitler was undeniably influenced by the bastardized versions of Darwin¬
ism and genetics that were popular in the early decades of the twentieth cen¬
tury, and he specifically cited natural selection and the survival of the fittest in
laying out his poisonous doctrine. He believed in an extreme Social Darwin¬
ism in which groups were the unit of selection and a struggle among groups
was necessary for national strength and vigor. He believed that the groups
were constitutionally distinct races, that their members shared a distinctive

The Fear of Inequality / 153

biological makeup, and that they differed from one another in strength,
courage, honesty, intelligence, and civic-mindedness. He wrote that the ex¬
tinction of inferior races was part of the wisdom of nature, that the superior
races owed their vitality and virtue to their genetic purity, and that the supe¬
rior races were in danger of being degraded by interbreeding with the inferior
ones. He used these beliefs to justify his war of conquest and his genocide of
Jews, Gypsies, Slavs, and homosexuals."

The misuse of biology by the Nazis is a reminder that perverted ideas can
have horrifying consequences and that intellectuals have a responsibility to
take reasonable care that their ideas not be misused for evil ends. But part of
that responsibility is not to trivialize the horror of Nazism by exploiting it for
rhetorical clout in academic catfights. Linking the people you disagree with to
Nazism does nothing for the memory of Hitler's victims or for the effort to
prevent other genocides. It is precisely because these events are so grave that
we have a special responsibility to identify their causes precisely.

An idea is not false or evil because the Nazis misused it. As the historian
Robert Richards wrote of an alleged connection between Nazism and evolu¬
tionary biology, “If such vague similarities suffice here, we should all be hus¬
tled to the gallows.?" Indeed, if we censored ideas that the Nazis abused, we
would have to give up far more than the application of evolution and genetics
to human behavior. We would have to censor the study of evolution and ge¬
netics, period. And we would have to suppress many other ideas that Hitler
twisted into the foundations of Nazism:

• The germ theory of disease: The Nazis repeatedly cited Pasteur and Koch to
argue that the Jews were like an infectious bacillus that had to be eradi¬
cated to control a contagious disease.

• Romanticism, environmentalism, and the love of nature: The Nazis ampli¬
fied a Romantic strain in German culture that believed the Yolk were a
people of destiny with a mystical bond to nature and the land. The Jews
and other minorities, in contrast, took root in the degenerate cities.

• Philology and linguistics: The concept of the Aryan race was based on a
prehistoric tribe posited by linguists, the Indo-Europeans, who were
thought to have spilled out of an ancient homeland thousands of years
ago and to have conquered much of Europe and Asia.

• Religious belief Though Hitler disliked Christianity, he was not an atheist,
and was emboldened by the conviction that he was carrying out a divinely
ordained plan."

The danger that we might distort our own science as a reaction to the
Nazis' distortions is not hypothetical. The historian of science Robert Proctor
has shown that American public health officials were slow to acknowledge that

154/Human Nature with a Human Face

smoking causes cancer because it was the Nazis who had originally established
the link. 32 And some German scientists argue that biomedical research has
been crippled in their country because of vague lingering associations to
Nazism."

Hitler was evil because he caused the deaths of thirty million people and
inconceivable suffering to countless others, not because his beliefs made refer¬
ence to biology (or linguistics or nature or smoking or God). Smearing the
guilt from his actions to every conceivable aspect of his factual beliefs can only
backfire. Ideas are connected to other ideas, and should any of Hitler’s turn out
to have some grain of truth-if races, for example, turn out to have any bio¬
logical reality, or if the Indo-Europeans really were a conquering tribe-we
would not want to concede that Nazism wasn't so wrong after all.

The Nazi Holocaust was a singular event that changed attitudes toward
countless political and scientific topics. But it was not the only ideologically in¬
spired holocaust in the twentieth century, and intellectuals are only beginning
to assimilate the lessons of the others: the mass killings in the Soviet Union,
China, Cambodia, and other totalitarian states carried out in the name of
Marxism. The opening of Soviet archives and the release of data and memoirs
on the Chinese and Cambodian revolutions are forcing a reevaluation of the
consequences of ideology as wrenching as that following World War II. Histo¬
rians are currently debating whether the Communists'mass executions, forced
marches, slave labor, and man-made famines led to one hundred million
deaths or “only” twenty-five million. They are debating whether these atroci¬
ties are morally worse than the Nazi Holocaust or «only" the equivalent."

And here is the remarkable fact: though both Nazi and Marxist ideologies
led to industrial-scale killing, their biological and psychological theories wereop-
posites. Marxists had no use for the concept of race.were averse to the notion
of genetic inheritance, and were hostile to the very idea of a human nature
rooted in biology," Marx and Engels did not explicitly embrace the doctrine
of the Blank Slate in their writings, but they were adamant that human nature
has no enduring properties. It consists only in the interactions of groups of
people with their material environments in a historical period, and constantly
changes as people change their environment and are simultaneously changed
by it." The mind therefore has no innate structure but emerges from the di¬
alectical processes of history and social interaction. As Marx put it:

All history is nothing but a continuous transformation of human na¬
ture."

Circumstances make men just as much as men make circumstances.38

The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political,

and intellectual life processes in general. It is not the consciousness of

The Fear of Inequality / 155

men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being
that determines their consciousness."

In a foreshadowing of Durkheim's and Kroeber's insistence that individual
human minds are not worthy of attention, Marx wrote:

Man is not an abstract being, squatting outside the world. Man is the
world of men, the State and Society. The essence of man is not an ab¬
straction inherent in each particular individual. The real nature of man
is the totality of social relations.i"

Individuals are dealt with only in so far as they are the personifications
of economic categories, embodiments of particular class-relations and
class interests."

[Death] seems to be a harsh victory of the species over the particular in¬
dividual and to contradict their unity. But the particular individual is
only a particular species-being, and as such mortal."

Marx's twentieth-century followers did embrace the Blank Slate, or at
least the related metaphor of malleable materiaL Lenin endorsed Nikolai
Bukharin’s ideal of "the manufacturing of Communist man out of the human
material of the capitalist age."43 Lenin's admirer Maxim Gorky wrote, "The
working classes are to Lenin what minerals are to the metallurgist"44 and
"Human raw material is immeasurably more difficult to work with than
wood" (the latter while admiring a canal built by slave labor)." We come
across the metaphor of the blank slate in the writings of a man who may have
been responsible for sixty-five million deaths:

A blank sheet of paper has no blotches, and so the newest and most
beautiful words can be written on it, the newest and most beautiful pic¬
tures can be painted on it.

-Mao Zedong"

And we find it in a saying of a political movement that killed a quarter of its
countrymen:

Only the newborn baby is spotless.

-Khmer Rouge slogarr"

The new realization that government-sponsored mass murder can come
from an anti-innatist belief system as easily as from an innatist one upends the
postwar understanding that biological approaches to behavior are uniquely

156/Human Nature with a Human Face

sinister. An accurate appraisal of the cause of state genocides must look for be¬
liefs common to Nazism and Marxism that launched them on their parallel
trajectories, and for the beliefs specific to Marxism that led to the unique
atrocities committed in its name. Anew wave of historians and philosophers
is doing exactly that. 48

Nazism and Marxism shared a desire to reshape humanity. “The altera¬
tion of men on a mass scale is necessary:' wrote Marx; “the will to create
mankind anew" is the core of National Socialism, wrote Hitler. 49 They also
shared a revolutionary idealism and a tyrannical certainty in pursuit of this
dream, with no patience for incremental reform or adjustments guided by
the human consequences of their policies. This alone was a recipe for disas¬
ter. As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote in The Gulag Archipelago, "Macbeth's
self-justifications were feeble-and his conscience devoured him. Yes, even
Iago was a little lamb too. The imagination and the spiritual strength of
Shakespeare's evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses. Because they had
no ideology."

The ideological connection between Marxist socialism and National So¬
cialism is not fanciful.so Hitler read Marx carefully while living in Munich in
1913, and may have picked up from him a fateful postulate that the two ide¬
ologies would share." It is the belief that history is a preordained succession of
conflicts between groups of people and that improvement in the human con¬
dition can come only from the victory of one group over the others. For the
Nazis the groups were races; for the Marxists they were classes. For the Nazis
the conflict was Social Darwinism; for the Marxists, it was class struggle. For
the Nazis the destined victors were the Aryans; for the Marxists, they were the
proletariat. The ideologies, once implemented, led to atrocities in a few steps:
struggle (often a euphemism for violence) is inevitable and beneficial; certain
groups of people (the non-Aryan races or the bourgeoisie) are morally infe¬
rior; improvements in human welfare depend on their subjugation or elimi¬
nation. Aside from supplying a direct justification for violent conflict, the
ideology of intergroup struggle ignites a nasty feature of human social psy¬
chology: the tendency to divide people into in-groups and out-groups and to
treat the out-groups as less than hunian. It doesn't matter whether the groups
are thought to be defined by their biology or by their history. Psychologists
have found that they can create instant intergroup hostility by sorting people
on just about any pretext, including the flip of a coin."

The ideology of group-against-group struggle explains the similar out¬
comes of Marxism and Nazism. The ideology of the Blank Slate helps explain
some of the features that were unique to the Marxist states:

• If people do not differ in psychological traits like talent or drive, then any¬
one who is better off must be avaricious or larcenous (as I mentioned

The Fear of Inequality / 157

earlier). Massive killing of kulaks and “rich” or "bourgeois" peasants was a
feature of Lenin's and Stalin's Soviet Union, Mao's China, and Pol Pot's
Cambodia.

• If the mind is structureless at birth and shaped by its experience, a society
that wants the right kind of minds must control the experience (“It is on
a blank page that the most beautiful poems are written").53 Twentieth-
century Marxist states were not just dictatorships but totalitarian dicta¬
torships. They tried to control every aspect oflife: childrearing, education,
clothing, entertainment, architecture, the arts, even food and sex. Authors
in the Soviet Union were enjoined to become "engineers of human souls."
In China and Cambodia, mandatory communal dining halls, same-sex
adult dormitories, and the separation of children from parents were re¬
curring (and detested) experiments.

• If people are shaped by their social environments, then growing up bour¬
geois can leave a permanent psychological stain ("Only the newborn baby
is spotless"). The descendants of landlords and "rich peasants" in
postrevolutionary regimes bore a permanent stigma and were persecuted
as readily as if bourgeois parentage were a genetic trait. Worse, since
parentage is invisible but discoverable by third parties, the practice of out¬
ing people with a "bad background" became a weapon of social competi¬
tion. That led to the atmosphere of denunciation and paranoia that made
life in these regimes an Orwellian nightmare.

• If there is no human nature leading people to favor the interests of their
families over "society,"then people who produce more crops on their own
plots than on communal farms whose crops are confiscated by the state
must be greedy or lazy and punished accordingly. Fear rather than self-
interest becomes the incentive to work.

• Most generally, if individual minds are interchangeable components of a
superorganic entity called society, then the society, not the individual, is
the natural unit of health and well-being and the proper beneficiary of
human striving. The rights of the individual person have no place.

None of this is meant to impugn the Blank Slate as an evil doctrine, any
more than a belief in human nature is an evil doctrine. Both are separated by
a great many steps from the wicked acts committed under their banners, and
they must be evaluated on factual grounds. But it is meant to overturn the sim¬
plistic linkage of the sciences of human nature with the moral catastrophes of
the twentieth century. That glib association stands in the way of our desire to
understand ourselves, and it stands in the way of the imperative to understand
the causes of those catastrophes. All the more so if the causes have something
to do with a side of ourselves we do not fully understand.

15 8/Human Nature with a Human Face

Chapter 9

The Fear of Imperfectibility

But Nature then was sovereign in my mind.

And mighty forms, seizing a youthful fancy,

Had given a charter to irregular hopes.

In any age of uneventful calm

Among the nations, surely would my heart

Have been possessed by similar desire;

But Europe at that time was thrilled with joy,

France standing on the top of golden hours,

\nd human nature seeming born again.

-William Wordsworth 1

IN WORDSWORTH’S REMINISCENCE we find the second fear raised by an in¬
nate psyche. The Romantic poet is exhilarated by the thought that human na¬
ture can be born again, and could only be depressed by the possibility that we
are permanently saddled with our fatal flaws and deadly sins. Romantic polit¬
ical thinkers have the same reaction, because an unchanging human nature
would seem to subvert all hope for reform. Why try to make the world a better
place if people are rotten to the core and will just foul it up no matter what you
do? It is no coincidence that thewritings of Rousseau inspired both the Ro¬
mantic movement in literature and the French Revolution in history, or that
the 1960s would see a resurfacing of romanticism and radical politics in tan-
demo The philosopher John Passmore has shown that a yearning for a better
world through a new and improved human nature is a recurring motif in
Western thought, which he summarizes in a remark by D. H. Lawrence; “The
Perfectibility of Man! Ah, heaven, what a dreary theme!'?

The dread of a permanently wicked human nature takes two forms. One
is a practical fear: that social reform is a waste of time because human nature
is unchangeable. The other is a deeper concern, which grows out of the Ro¬
mantic belief that what is natural is good. According to the worry, if scientists

The Fear of Imperfectibility / 159

suggest it is "natural"-part of human nature-to be adulterous, violent, eth¬
nocentric, and selfish, they would be implying that these traits are good, not
just unavoidable.

As with the other convictions surrounding the Blank Slate, the fear of im-
perfectibility makes some sense in the context of twentieth-century history. A
revulsion to the idea that people are naturally bellicose or xenophobic is an
understandable reaction to an ideology that glorified war. One of the most
memorable images I came across as a graduate student was a painting of a
dead soldier in a muddy field. A uniformed ghost floated up from his corpse,
one arm around a cloaked and faceless man, the other around a bare-breasted
blond valkyrie. The caption read, "Happy those who with a glowing faith in
one embrace clasped death and victory." Was it a kitschy poster recruiting can¬
non fodder for an imperial exploit? A jingoistic monument in the castle of a
Prussian military aristocrat? No, Deathand Victory was painted in 1922 by the
gfeat American artist John Singer Sargent and hangs prominently in one ofthe
world's most famous scholarly libraries, the Widener at Harvard University.

That a piece of pro-death iconography should decorate these hallowed
halls oflearning is a testament to the warmongering mentality ofdecades past.
War was thought to be invigorating, ennobling, the natural aspiration of men
and nations.This belief led world leaders to sleepwalk into World War I and
millions of men to enlist eagerly, oblivious to the carnage that lay ahead. Be¬
ginning with the disillusionment following that war and culminating in the
widespread opposition to the war in Vietnam, Western sensibilities have
steadily recoiled from the glorification of combat. Even recent works meant to
honor the courage of fighting men, such as the movie Saving Private Ryan,
show war as a hell that brave men endured at terrible cost to eliminate an iden¬
tified evil, not something they could possibly feel "happy" about. Real wars
today are waged with remote-control gadgetry to minimize casualties, some¬
times at the cost of downgrading the war's objectives. In this climate any sug¬
gestion that war is "natural" will be met with indignant declarations to the
contrary, such as the recurring Statements on Violence by social scientists
averring that it is "scientifically incorrect" to say that humans have tendencies
toward aggression.'

A hostility to the idea that selfish sexual urges might be rooted in our na¬
ture comes from feminism. For millennia women have suffered under a dou¬
ble standard based on assumptions about differences between the sexes. Laws
and customs punished the philandering of women more harshly than the phi¬
landering of men. Fathers and husbands stripped women of control over their
sexuality by constraining their appearance and movement. Legal systems ex¬
onerated rapists or mitigated their punishment if the victim was thought to
have aroused an irresistible urge by her dress or behavior. Authorities brushed
off victims of harassment, stalking, and battering by assuming that these

1 60/Human Nature with a Human Face

crimes were normal features of courtship or marriage. Because of a fear of ac¬
cepting any idea that would seem to make these outrages "natural" or un¬
avoidable) some schools of feminism have rejected any suggestion that men
are born with greater sexual desire or jealousy. We saw in Chapter 7 that the
claim that men want casual sex more than women do has been denounced by
both the right and the left. Even heavier bipartisan fire has recently been aimed
at Randy Thornhill and Craig Palmer for suggesting in their book A Natural
History of Rape that rape is a consequence of men's sexuality. A spokesperson
from the Feminist Majority Foundation called the book "scary" and "regres¬
sive” because it "almost validates the crime and blames the victim,”! A
spokesperson for the Discovery Institute) a creationist organization, testified
at a U.S. congressional hearing that the book threatened the moral fabric upon
which America is founded.'

A third vice with political implications is selfishness. If people, like other
animals) are driven by selfish genes, selfishness might seem inevitable or even
a virtue. The argument is fallacious from the start because selfish genes do not
necessarily grow selfish organisms. Still, let us consider the possibility that
people might have some tendency to value their own interests and those of
their family and friends above the interests of the tribe, society, or species. The
political implications are spelled out in the two major philosophies of how so¬
cieties should be organized, which make opposite assumptions about innate
human selfishness:

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker

that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.

We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love.

-Adam Smith

From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.

-Karl Marx

Smith the explainer of capitalism assumes that people will selfishly give their
labor according to their needs and will be paid according to their abilities (be¬
cause the payers are selfish, too). Marx the architect of communism and so¬
cialism assumes that in a socialist society of the future the butcher, the brewer,
and the baker will provide us with dinner out of benevolence or self-
actualization-for why else would they cheerfully exert themselves according
to their abilities and not according to their needs?

Those who believe that communism or socialism is the most rational
form of social organization are aghast at the suggestion that they run against
our selfish natures. For that matter, everyone, regardless of politics) has to be
appalled at people who impose costs on society in pursuit of their individual

The Fear of Imperfectibility / 161

interests-hunting endangered species, polluting rivers, destroying historic
sites to build shopping malls, spraying graffiti on public monuments, invent¬
ing weapons that elude metal detectors. Equally disturbing are the outcomes
of actions that make sense to the individual choosing them but are costly to so¬
ciety when everyone chooses them. Examples include overfishing a harbor,
overgrazing a commons, commuting on a bumper-to-bumper freeway, or
buying a sport utility vehicle to protect oneself in a collision because everyone
else is driving a sport utility vehicle. Many people dislike the suggestion that
humans are inclined to selfishness because it would seem to imply that these
self-defeating patterns of behavior are inevitable, or at least reducible only
through permanent coercive measures.

THE FEAR OF imperfectibility and the resultant embrace of the Blank Slate are
rooted in a pair of fallacies. We have already met the naturalistic fallacy, the be¬
lief that whatever happens in nature is good. One might think that the belief
was irreversibly tainted by Social Darwinism, but it was revived by the roman¬
ticism of the 1960s and 1970s. The environmentalist movement, in particular,
often appeals to the goodness of nature to promote conservation of natural
environments, despite their ubiquitous gore. For example, predators such as
wolves, bears, and sharks have been given an image makeover as euthanists of
the old and the lame, and thus worthy of preservation or reintroduction. It
would seem to follow that anything we have inherited from this Eden is
healthy and proper, so a claim that aggression or rape is "natural;' in the sense
of having been favored by evolution, is tantamount to saying that it is good.

The naturalistic fallacy leads quickly to its converse, the moralistic fallacy;
that if a trait is moral, it must be found in nature. That is, not only does "is"
imply "ought;' but "ought" implies “is.” Nature, including human nature, is
stipulated to have only virtuous traits (no needless killings, no rapacity, no ex¬
ploitation), or no traits at all, because the alternative is too horrible to accept.
That is why the naturalistic and moralistic fallacies are so often associated with
the Noble Savage and the Blank Slate.

Defenders of the naturalistic and moralistic fallacies are not made of straw
but include prominent scholars and writers. For example, in response to
Thornhill's earlier writings on rape, the feminist scholar Susan Brownmiller
wrote, "It seems quite clear that the biologicization of rape and the dismissal

of social or 'moral' factors will... tend to legitimate rape_It is reductive

and reactionary to isolate rape from other forms of violent antisocial behavior
and dignify it with adaptive significance." Note the fallacy; if something is ex¬
plained with biology, it has been "legitimated"; if something is shown to be
adaptive, it has been "dignified." Similarly, Stephen Jay Gould wrote of another
discussion of rape in animals, “By falsely describing an inherited behavior in
birds with an old name for a deviant human action, we subtly suggest that true

162/Human Nature with a Human Face

rape-our own kind-might be a natural behavior with Darwinian advan¬
tages to certain people as well:'? The implicit rebuke is that to describe an act
as "natural" or as having "Darwinian advantages" is somehow to condone it.

The moralistic fallacy, like the naturalistic fallacy, is, well, a fallacy, as we
learn from this ArloandJanis cartoon:

Arlo & Janis reprinted by permission of Newspaper Enterprise Association, Inc.

The boy has biology on his side." George Williams, the revered evolutionary
biologist, describes the natural world as “grossly immoral,"? Having no fore-
sightor compassion, natural selection “can honestly be described as a process
for maximizing short-sighted selfishness.t.On top of all the miseries inflicted
by predators and parasites, the members of a species show no pity to their own
kind. Infanticide, siblicide, and rape can be observed in many kinds of ani¬
mals; infidelity is common even in so-called pair-bonded species; cannibalism
can be expected in all species that are not strict vegetarians; death from fight¬
ing is more common in most animal species than it is in the most violent
American cities. 10 Commenting on how biologists used to describe the killing
of starving deer by mountain lions as an act of mercy, Williams wrote:

The simple facts are that both predation and starvation are painful
prospects for deer, and that the lion’s lot is no more enviable. Perhaps bi¬
ology would have been able to mature more rapidly in a culture not
dominated by Judeo-Christian theology and the Romantic tradition. It
might have been well served by the First Holy Truth from [Buddha's]
Sermon at Benares: "Birth is painful, old age is painful, sickness is
painful, death is painful ..11

As soon as we recognize that there is nothing morally commendable about
the products of evolution, we can describe human psychology honestly, with¬
out the fear that identifying a "natural" trait is the same as condoning it. As
Katharine Hepburn says to Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen, "Nature,
Mr. Allnut, is what we are put in this world to rise above."

Crucially, this cuts both ways. Many commentators from the religious
and cultural right believe that any behavior that strikes them as biologically

The Fear of Imperfectibility / 163

atypical, such as homosexuality, voluntary childlessness, and women who as¬
sume traditional male roles or vice versa, should be condemned because it is
"unnatural." For example, the popular talk-show host Laura Schlesinger has
declared, "I am getting people to stop doing wrong and start doing right." As
part of this crusade she has called on gay people to submit to therapy to change
their sexual orientation, because homosexuality is a "biological error." This
kind ofmoral reasoning can come only from people who know nothing about
biology. Most activities that moral people extol-being faithful to one's
spouse, turning the other cheek, treating every child as precious, loving thy
neighbor as thyself-are "biological errors" and are utterly unnatural in the
rest of the living world.

Acknowledging the naturalistic fallacy does not mean that facts about
human nature are irrelevant to our choices." The political scientist Roger
Masters, noting that the naturalistic fallacy can be invoked too glibly to deny
the relevance of biology to human affairs, points out, «When the physician says
a patient ought to have an operation because the facts show appendicitis, the
patient is unlikely to complain about a fallacious logical deduction."!' Ac¬
knowledging the naturalistic fallacy implies only that discoveries about
human nature do not, by themselves, dictate our choices. The facts must be
combined with a statement of values and a method of resolving conflicts
among them. Given the fact of appendicitis, the value that health is desirable,
and the conviction that the pain and expense of the operation are outweighed
by the resulting gain in health, one ought to have the operation.

Suppose rape is rooted in a feature of human nature, such as that men want
sex across a wider range of circumstances than women do. It is also a feature of
human nature, just as deeply rooted in our evolution, that women want control
over when and with whom they have sex. It is inherent to our value system that
the interests of women should not be subordinated to those of men, and that
control over one's body is a fundamental right that trumps other people's de¬
sires. So rape is not tolerated, regardless of any possible connection to the na¬
ture of men's sexuality. Note how this calculus requires a «deterministic" and
“€Ssentialist”claimabout human nature: that women abhor being raped. With¬
out that claim we would have no way to choose between trying to deter rape and
trying to socialize women to accept it, which would be perfectly compatible
with the supposedly progressive doctrine that we are malleable raw material.

In other cases, the best way to resolve a conflict is not as obvious. The psy¬
chologists Martin Daly and Margo Wilson have documented that stepparents
are far more likely to abuse a child than are biological parents. The discovery was
by no means banal: many parenting experts insist that the abusive stepparent is
a myth originating in Cinderella stories and that parenting is a «role" that any¬
one can take on. Daly and Wilson had originally examined the abuse statistics
to test a prediction from evolutionary psychology .u Parental love is selected over

164 / Human Nature with a Human Face

evolutionary time because it compels parents to protect and nurture their chil¬
dren, who are likely to carry the genes giving rise to parental love. In any species
in which someone else's offspring are likely to enter the family circle, selection
will favor a tendency to prefer one's own, because in the cold reckoning of nat¬
ural selection an investment in the unrelated children would go to waste. A par¬
ent’s patience will tend to run out with stepchildren more quickly than with
biological children, and in extreme cases this can lead to abuse.

Does all this mean that social service agencies should monitor steppar¬
ents more closely than biological parents? Not so fast. The vast majority of
both kinds of parents never commit abuse, so putting stepparents under a
cloud of suspicion would be unfair to millions of innocent people. As the
legal scholar Owen Jones points out, the evolutionary analysis of stepparent -
ing-or of anything else-has no automatic policy implications. Rather, it
delineates a tradeoff and forces us to choose an optimum along it. In this
case, the tradeoff is between minimizing child abuse while stigmatizing step¬
parents, on one hand, and being maximally fair to stepparents while tolerat¬
ing an increase in child abuse, on the other," If we did not know that people
are predisposed to lose patience with stepchildren faster than with biological
children, we would implicitly choose one end of this tradeoff-ignoring step¬
parenting as a risk factor altogether, and tolerating the extra cases of child
abuse-without even realizing it.

An understanding of human nature with all its weaknesses can enrich not
just our policies but our personal lives. Families with stepchildren tend to be
less happy and more fragile than families with biological children, largely be¬
cause of tensions over how much time, patience, and money the stepparents
should expend. Many stepparents, nonetheless, are kind and generous to a
spouse's children, in part out of love for the spouse. Still, there is a difference
between the instinctive love that parents automatically lavish on their own
children and the deliberate kindness and generosity that wise stepparents ex¬
tend to their stepchildren. Understanding this difference, Daly and Wilson
suggest, could enhance a marriage." Though a marriage based on strict tit-
for-tat reciprocity is generally miserable, a good marriage finds each spouse
appreciating the sacrifices that the other has made over the long haul. Ac¬
knowledging a partner's conscious benevolence toward one's children may ul¬
timately breed less resentment and misunderstanding than demanding such
benevolence as a matter of course and begrudging any ambivalence the part¬
ner may feel. It is one of many ways in which a realism about the imperfect
emotions we actually have may bring more happiness than an illusion about
the ideal emotions we wish we had.

SO if we are put in this world to rise above nature, how do we do it? Where in
the causal chain of evolved genes building a neural computer do we find a

The Fear of Irnperfectibility / 165

chink into which we can fit the seemingly unmechanical event of "choosing
values”? By allowing for choice, are we just inviting a ghost back into the ma¬
chine?

The question is itself a symptom of the Blank Slate. If one starts off think¬
ing the slate is blank, then when someone proposes an innate desire one will
mentally plunk it onto the barren surface in one's imagination and conclude
that it must be an ineluctable urge, because there is nothing else on the slate to
counteract it. Selfish thoughts translate into selfish behavior, aggressive urges
beget natural-born killers, a taste for multiple sexual partners means that men
just can’t helpfooling around. For example, when the primatologist Michael
Ghiglieri appeared on the National Public Radio program Science Friday to
talk about his book on violence, the interviewer asked, “You explain rape and
murder and war and all the bad things that men do as something-if I would
just boil it down-something they can't help because of its—it’s locked up in
their evolutionary genes therei"'?

If, however, the mind is a system with many parts, then an innate desire is
just one component among others. Some faculties may endow us with greed
or lust or malice, but others may endow us with sympathy, foresight, self-
respect, a desire for respect from others, and an ability to learn from our own
experiences and those of our neighbors. These are physical circuits residing in
the prefrontal cortex and other parts of the brain, not occult powers of a pol¬
tergeist, and they have a genetic basis and an evolutionary history no less than
the primal urges. It is only the Blank Slate and the Ghost in the Machine that
make people think that drives are "biological» but that thinking and decision
making are something else.

The faculties underlying empathy, foresight, and self-respect are
information-processing systems that accept input and commandeer other
parts of the brain and body. They are combinatorial systems, like the mental
grammar underlying language, capable of cranking out an unlimited number
of ideas and courses of action. Personal and social change can come about
when people exchange information that affects those mechanisms-even if we
are nothing but meat puppets, glorified clockwork, or lumbering robots cre¬
ated by selfish genes.

Not only is acknowledging human nature compatible with social and
moral progress, but it can help explain the obvious progress that has taken
place over millennia. Customs that were common throughout history and
prehistory-slavery, punishment by mutilation, execution by torture, geno¬
cide for convenience, endless blood feuds, the summary killing of strangers,
rape as the spoils of war, infanticide as a form of birth control, and the legal
ownership of women-have vanished from large parts of the world.

The philosopher Peter Singer has shown how continuous moral progress
can emerge from a fixed moral sensed" Suppose we are endowed with a con-

166/Human Nature with a Human Face

science that treats other persons as targets of sympathy and inhibits us from
harming or exploiting them. Suppose, too, that we have a mechanism for as¬
sessing whether a living thing gets to be classified as a person. (After all, we
don't want to classify plants as persons and starve before we would eat them.)
Singer explains moral improvement in the title of his book: The Expanding
Circle. People have steadily expanded the mental dotted line that embraces the
entities considered worthy of moral consideration. The circle has been poked
outward from the family and village to the clan, the tribe, the nation, the race,
and most recently (as in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights) to all of
humanity. It has been slackened from royalty, aristocracy, and property hold¬
ers to all men. It has grown from including only men to including women,
children, and newborns. It has crept outward to embrace criminals,prisoners
of war, enemy civilians, the dying, and the mentally handicapped.

Nor are the possibilities for moral progress over. Today some people want
to enlarge the circle to include great apes, warm-blooded creatures, or animals
with central nervous systems. Some want to count in zygotes, blastocysts, fe¬
tuses, and the brain-dead. Still others want to embrace species, ecosystems, or
the entire planet. This sweeping change in sensibilities, the driving force in the
moral history of our species, did not require a blank slate or a ghost in the ma¬
chine. It could have arisen from a moral gadget containing a single knob or
slider that adjusts the size of the circle embracing the entities whose interests
we treat as comparable to our own.

The expansion of the moral circle does not have to be powered by some
mysterious drive toward goodness. It may come from the interaction between
the selfish process of evolution and a law of complex systems. The biologists
John Maynard Smith and Eors Szathmary and the journalist Robert Wright
have explained how evolution can lead to greater and greater degrees of coop¬
eration." Repeatedly in the history oflife, replicators have teamed up, special¬
ized to divide the labor, and coordinated their behavior. It happens because
replicators often find themselves in non-zero-sum games, in which particular
strategies adopted by two players can leave them both better off (as opposed to
a zero-sum game, where one player's profit is another player's loss). An exact
analogy is found in the play by William Butler Yeats in which a blind man car¬
ries a lame man on his shoulders, allowing both of them to get around. During
the evolution oflife this dynamic has led replicating molecules to team up in
chromosomes, organelles to team up in cells, cells to agglomerate into complex
organisms, and organisms to hang out in societies. Independent agents repeat¬
edly made their fate hostage to a larger system, not because they are inherently
civic-minded but because they benefited from the division oflabor and devel¬
oped ways of damping conflicts among the agents making up the system.

Human societies, like living things, have become more complicated and
cooperative over time. Again, it is because agents do better when they team up

The Fear of Irnperfectibility / 167

and specialize in pursuit of their shared interests, as long as they solve the
problems of exchanging information and punishing cheaters. If I have more
fruit than I can eat and you have more meat than you can eat, it pays each of
us to trade our surplus with the other. If we face a common enemy, then, as
Benjamin Franklin put it, "We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all
hang separately."

Wright argues that three features of human nature led to a steadyexpan-
sion of the circle of human cooperators. One is the cognitive wherewithal to
figure out how the world works. This yields know-how worth sharing and an
ability to spread goods and information over larger territories, both of which
expand opportunities for gains in trade. A second is language, which allows
technology to be shared, bargains to be struck, and agreements to be enforced.
A third is an emotional repertoire-s-sympathy, trust, guilt, anger, self-esteem-s-
that impels us to seek new cooperators, maintain relationships with them, and
safeguard the relationships against possible exploitation. Long ago these en¬
dowments put our species on a moral escalator. Our mental circle of respect¬
worthy persons expanded in tandem with our physical circle of allies and
trading partners. As technology accumulates and people in more parts of the
planet become interdependent, the hatred between them tends to decrease,
for the simple reason that you can't kill someone and trade with him too.

Non-zero-sum games arise not just from people's ability to help one an¬
other but from their ability to refrain from hurting one another. In many dis¬
putes, both sides come out ahead by dividing up the savings made available
from not having to fight. That provides an incentive to develop technologies of
conflict resolution, such as mediation, face-saving measures, measured resti¬
tution and retribution, and legal codes. The primatologist Frans de Waal has
argued that the rudiments ofconflict resolution may be found in many species
of primates. 20 The human forms are ubiquitous across cultures, as universal as
the conflicts of interest they are designed to defuse."

Though the evolution of the expanding circle (its ultimate cause) may
sound pragmatic or even cynical, the psychology of the expanding circle (its
proximate cause) need not be. Once the sympathy knob is in place, having
evolved to enjoy the benefits of cooperation and exchange, it can be cranked up
by new kinds of information that other folks are similar to oneself. Words and
images from erstwhile enemies can trigger the sympathy response. A historical
record can warn against self-defeating cycles of vendetta. A cosmopolitan
awareness may lead people to think, "There but for fortune go I.” An expansion
of sympathy may come from something as basic as the requirement to be log¬
ically consistent when imploring other people to behave in certain ways: peo¬
ple come to realize that they cannot force others to abide by rules that they
themselves flout. Egoistic, sexist, racist, and xenophobic attitudes are logically

168/Human Nature with a Human Face

inconsistent with the demand that everyone respect a single code ofbehavior. 22

Peaceful coexistence, then, does not have to come from pounding selfish
desires out of people. It can come from pitting some desires--the desire for
safety, the benefits of cooperation, the ability to formulate and recognize uni¬
versal codes ofbehavior-against the desire for immediate gain. These are just
a few of the ways in which moral and social progress can ratchet upwards, not
in spite of a fixed human nature but because of it.

when you stop to think about it, the idea of a pliant human nature does not
deserve its reputation for optimism and uplift. If it did, B.F. Skinner would
have been lauded as a great humanitarian when he argued that society should
apply the technology ofconditioning to humans, shaping people to use con¬
traception, conserve energy, make peace, and avoid crowded cities." Skinner
was a staunch blank-slater and a passionate utopian.?llis uncommonly pure
vision allows us to examine the implications of the "optimistic" denial of
human nature. Given his premise that undesirable behavior is not in the genes
but a product of the environment, it follows that we should control that envi-
ronment-for all we would be doing is replacing haphazard schedules ofrein-
forcement by planned ones.

Why are most people repelled by this vision? Critics of Skinner's Beyond
Freedom and Dignity pointed out that no one doubts that behavior can be con¬
trolled; putting a gun to someone's head or threatening him with torture are
time-honored techniques." Even Skinner's preferred method of operant con¬
ditioning required starving the organism to 80 percent of its free-feeding
weight and confining it to a box where schedules of reinforcement were care¬
fully controlled. The issue is not whether we can change human behavior, but
at what cost.

Since we are not just products of our environments, there will be costs.
People have inherent desires such as comfort, love, family, esteem, autonomy,
aesthetics, and self-expression, regardless of their history of reinforcement,
and they suffer when the freedom to exercise the desires is thwarted. Indeed, it
is difficult to define psychological pain without some notion of human nature.
(Even the young Marx appealed to a "species character," with an impulse for
creative activity, as the basis for his theory of alienation. ) Sometimes we may
choose to impose suffering to control behavior, as when we punish people
who cause avoidable suffering in others. But we cannot pretend that we can re¬
shape behavior without infringing in some way on other people's freedom and
happiness. Human nature is the reason we do not surrender our freedom to
behavioral engineers.

Inborn human desires are a nuisance to those with utopian and totalitar¬
ian visions, which often amount to the same thing. What stands in the way of

The Fear of Imperfectibility / 169

most utopias is not pestilence and drought but human behavior. So Utopians
have to think of ways to control behavior, and when propaganda doesn't do
the trick, more emphatic techniques are tried. The Marxist Utopians of the
twentieth century, as we saw, needed a tabula rasa free of selfishness and fam¬
ily ties and used totalitarian measures to scrape the tablets dean or start over
with new ones. As Bertolt Brecht said of the East German government, "If the
people did not do better the government would dismiss the people and elect a
new one:' Political philosophers and historians who have recently "reflected
on our ravaged century," such as Isaiah Berlin. Kenneth Minogue, Robert Con¬
quest, Jonathan Glover, James Scott, and Daniel Chirot, have pointed to
utopian dreams as a major cause of twentieth-century nightmares.” For that
matter, Wordsworth's revolutionary France, "thrilled with joy" while human
nature was "born again," turned out to be no picnic either.

It's not just behaviorists and Stalinists who forgot that a denial of human
nature may have costs in freedom and happiness. Twentieth-century Marxism
was part of a larger intellectual current that has been called Authoritarian High
Modernism: the conceit that planners could redesign society from the top
down using "scientific" principles." The architect Fe Corbusier, for example,
argued that urban planners should not be fettered by traditions and tastes,
since they only perpetuated the overcrowded chaos of the cities of his day. "We
must build places where mankind will be reborn;' he wrote. "Each man will live
in an ordered relation to the whole,"? In Fe Corbusier's utopia, planners would
begin with a "clean tablecloth" (sound familiar?) and mastermind all buildings
and public spaces to service "human needs," They had a minimalist conception
of those needs: each person was thought to require a fixed amount of air, heat,
light, and space for eating, sleeping, working, commuting, and a few other ac¬
tivities. It did not occur to Fe Corbusier that intimate gatherings with family
and friends might be a human need, so he proposed large communal dining
halls to replace kitchens, Also missing from his list of needs was the desire to
socialize in small groups in public places, so he planned his cities around free¬
ways, large buildings, and vast open plazas, with no squares or crossroads in
which people would feel comfortable hanging out to schmooze. Homes were
"machines for living;' free of archaic inefficiencies like gardens and ornamen¬
tation, and thus were efficiently packed together in large, rectangular housing
projects.

Fe Corbusier was frustrated in his aspiration to flatten Paris, Buenos Aires,
and Rio de Janeiro and rebuild them according to his scientific principles. But
in the 1950s he was given carte blanche to design Chandigarh, the capital of
the Punjab, and one of his disciples was given a clean tablecloth for Brasilia,
the capital of Brazil. Today, both cities are notorious as uninviting wastelands
detested by the civil servants who live in them. Authoritarian High Mod¬
ernism also led to the "urban renewal" projects in many American cities dur-

1 70/Human Nature with a Human Face

ing the 1960s that replaced vibrant neighborhoods with freeways, high-rises,
and empty windswept plazas.

Social scientists, too, have sometimes gotten carried away with dreams of
social engineering. The child psychiatrist Bruce Perry, concerned that ghetto
mothers are not giving children the enriched environment needed by their
plastic brains, believes we must "transform our culture": “We need to change
our child rearing practices, we need to change the malignant and destructive
view that children are the property of their biological parents. Human beings
evolved not as individuals, but as communities.... Children belong to the
community, they are entrusted to their parents.?" Now, no one could object to
rescuing children from neglect or cruelty, but if Perry's transformedculture
came to pass, men with guns could break up any family that did not conform
to the latest fad in parenting theory. As we will see in the chapter on children,
most of these fads are based on flawed studies that treat every correlation be¬
tween parents and children as proof of causation. Asian American and African
American parents often flout the advice of the child-development gurus, using
more traditional, authoritarian styles of childrearing that in all likelihood do
their children no lasting harm." The parenting police could strip them of their
children.

Nothing in the concept of human nature is inconsistent with the ideals of
feminism, or so I will argue in the chapter on gender. But some feminist theo¬
reticians have embraced the Blank Slate and with it an authoritarian political
philosophy that would give the government sweeping powers to implement
their vision of gender-free minds. In a 1975 dialogue, ^imone de Beauvoir
said; “No woman should be authorized to stay at home to raise her children.
Society should be totally different. Women should not have that choice, pre¬
cisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one,"?"
Gloria Steinem was a bit more liberal; in a 1970 Time article she wrote: “The
[feminist] revolution would not take away the option of being a housewife. A
woman who prefers to be her husband's housekeeper and/or hostess would re¬
ceive a percentage of his pay determined by the domestic-relations courts,":"
Betty Friedan has spoken out in favor of "compulsory preschool" for two-
year-olds.F Catharine MacKinnon (who with Andrea Dworkin has pushed
for laws against erotica) has said, "What you need is people who see through
literature like Andrea Dworkin, who see through law like me, to see through
art and create the uncompromised women’s visual vocabulary'Pv-e-oblivious
to the danger inherent in a few intellectuals' arrogating the role of deciding
which art and literature the rest of society will enjoy.

In an interview in the New York Times Magazine, Carol Gilligan explained
the implications of her (preposterous) theory that behavior problems in boys,
such as stuttering and hyperactivity, are caused by cultural norms that pres¬
sure them to separate from their mothers:

The Fear of Imperfectibility / 171

Q: You would argue that men's biology is not so powerful that we can't
change the culture of men?

A: Right. We have to build a culture that doesn't reward that separation
from the person who raised them....

Q: Everything you've said suggests that unless men change in funda¬
mental ways, we're not going to have a sea change in the culture.

A: That seems right to me."

An incredulous reader, hearing an echo of the attempt to engineer a "new so¬
cialist man;' asked, "Does anyone, even in academia, still believe that this sort
of thing turns out well?"35 He was right to be concerned. In many schools,
teachers have been told, falsely, that there is an "opportunity zone" in which a
child's gender identification is malleable. They have used this zone to try to
stamp out boyhood: banning same-sex play groups and birthday parties, forc¬
ing children to do gender-atypical activities, suspending boys who run during
recess or play cops and robbers." In her book The War Against Boys, the
philosopher Christina Hoff Sommers rightly calls this agenda "meddlesome,
abusive, and quite beyond what educators in a free society are mandated to
do."3?

Feminism, far from needing a blank slate, needs the opposite, a clear
conception of human nature. One of the most pressing feminist causes
today is the condition of women in the developing world. In many places fe¬
male fetuses are selectively aborted, newborn girls are killed, daughters are
malnourished and kept from school, adolescent girls have their genitals cut
out, young women are cloaked from head to toe, adulteresses are stoned to
death, and widows are expected to fall onto their husbands' funeral pyres.
The relativist climate in many academic circles does not allow these horrors
to be criticized because they are practices of other cultures) and cultures are
superorganisms that, like people, have inalienable rights. To escape this trap,
the feminist philosopher Martha Nussbaum has invoked "central functional
capabilities" that all humans have a right to exercise, such as physical in¬
tegrity, liberty of conscience, and political participation. She has been criti¬
cized in turn for taking on a colonial "civilizing mission" or "white woman's
burden," in which arrogant Europeans would instruct the poor people of the
world in what they want. But Nussbaum's moral argument is defensible if
her "capabilities" are grounded, directly or indirectly, in a universal human
nature. Human nature provides a yardstick to identify suffering in any mem¬
ber of our species.

The existence of a human nature is not a reactionary doctrine that dooms
us to eternal oppression, violence, and greed. Of course we should try to reduce
harmful behavior, just as we try to reduce afflictions like hunger, disease, and

172/Human Nature with a Human Face

the elements. But we fight those afflictions not by denying the pesky facts of
nature but by turning some of them against the others. For efforts at social
change to be effective, they must identify the cognitive and moral resources
that make some kinds of change possible. And for the efforts to be humane,
they must acknowledge the universal pleasures and pains that make some
kinds of change desirable.

The Fearof Imperfectibility / 173

Chapter 10

The Fear of Determinism

THIS CHAPTER IS not about the boo-word that is frequently (and inaccu¬
rately) hurled at any explanation of a behavioral tendency that mentions evo¬
lution or genetics. It is about determinism in its original sense, the concept
that is opposed to "free will" in introductory philosophy courses. The fear of
determinism in this sense is captured in a limerick:

There was a young man who said: "Damn!

It grieves me to think that I am

Predestined to move

In a circumscribed groove:

In fact, not a bus, but a tram."

In the traditional conception of a ghost in the machine, our bodies are in¬
habited by a self or a soul that chooses the behavior to be executed by the body.
These choices are not compelled by some prior physical event, like one billiard
ball smacking into another and sending it into a corner pocket. The idea that
our behavior is caused by the physiological activity of a genetically shaped
brain would seem to refute the traditional view. It would make our behavior
an automatic consequence of molecules in motion and leave no room for an
uncaused behavior-chooser.

One fear of determinism is a gaping existential anxiety: that deep down
we are not in control of our own choices. All our brooding and agonizing over
the right thing to do is pointless, it would seem, because everything has already
been preordained by the state of our brains. If you suffer from this anxiety, I
suggest the following experiment. For the next few days, don't bother deliber¬
ating over your actions. It's a waste of time, after all; they have already been de¬
termined. Shoot from the hip, live for the moment, and if it feels good do it.
No, I am not seriously suggesting that you try this! But a moment's reflection
on what would happen if you did try to give up making decisions should serve

174/Human Nature with a Human Face

as a Valium for the existential anxiety. The experience of choosing is not a fic¬
tion, regardless of how the brain works. It is a real neural process, with the ob¬
vious function of selecting behavior according to its foreseeable consequences.
It responds to information from the senses, including the exhortations of
other people. You cannot step outside it or let it go on without you because it
fs'you. If the most ironclad form of determinism is real, you could not do any¬
thing about it any way, because your anxiety about determinism, and how you
would deal with it, would also be determined. It is the existential fear of deter¬
minism that is the real waste of time.

A more practical fear of determinism is captured in a saying by A. A. Milne:
«No doubt Jack the Ripper excused himself on the grounds that it was human
nature." The fear is that an understanding of human nature seems to eat away
at the notion of personal responsibility. In the traditional view, the self or soul,
having chosen what to do, takes responsibility when things turn out badly. As
with the desk of Harry Truman, the buck stops here. But when we attribute an
action to a person's brain, genes, or evolutionary history, it seems that we no
longer hold the "individual accountable. Biology becomes the perfect alibi, the
get-out-of-jail-free card, the ultimate doctor's excuse note. As we have seen,
this accusation has been made by the religious and cultural right, who want to
preserve the soul, and the academic left, who want to preserve a«we"who can
construct our own futures though in circumstances not of our own choosing.

Why is the notion offree will so closely tied to the notion of responsibility,
and why is biology thought to threaten both? Here is the logic. We blame peo¬
ple for an evil act or bad decision only when they intended the consequences
and could have chosen otherwise. We don't convict a hunter who shoots a
friend he has mistaken for a deer, or the chauffeur who drove John F. Kennedy
into the line of fire, because they could not foresee and did not intend the out¬
come of their actions. We show mercy to the victim of torture who betrays a
comrade, to a delirious patient who lashes out at a nurse, or to a madman who
strikes someone he believes to be a ferocious animal.because we feel they are
not in command of their faculties. We don't put a small child on trial if he
causes a death, nor do we try an animal or an inanimate object, because we be¬
lieve them to be constitutionally incapable of making an informed choice.

A biology of human nature would seem to admit more and more people
into the ranks of the blameless. A murderer may not literally be a raving lu¬
natic, but our newfangled tools might pick up a shrunken amygdala or a hypo-
metabolism in his frontal lobes or a defective gene for monoamine oxidase A,
which renders him just as out of control. Or perhaps a test from the cognitive
psychology lab will show that he has chronically limited foresight, rendering
him oblivious to consequences, or that he has a defective theory of mind, mak¬
ing him incapable of appreciating the suffering of others. After all, if there is
no ghost in the machine, something in the criminal's hardware must set him

The Fear of Determinism / 175

apart from the majority of people, those who would not hurt or kill in the
same circumstances. Pretty soon we will find that something, and, it is feared,
murderers will be excused from criminal punishment as surely as we now ex¬
cuse madmen and small children.

Even worse, biology may show that we are a//blamelcss. Evolutionary the¬
ory says that the ultimate rationale for our motives is that they perpetuated
our ancestors' genes in the environment in which we evolved. Since none of us
are aware of that rationale, none of us can be blamed for pursuing it, any more
than we blame the mental patient who thinks he is subduing a mad dog but re¬
ally is attacking a nurse. We scratch our heads when we learn of ancient cus¬
toms that punished the soulless: the Hebrew rule of stoning an ox to death if it
killed a man, the Athenian practice of putting an ax on trial if it injured a man
(and hurling it over the city wall if found guilty), a medieval French case in
which a sow was sentenced to be mangled for having mauled a child, and the
whipping and burial of a church bell in 1685 for having assisted French
heretics.’ But evolutionary biologists insist we are not fundamentally different
from animals, and molecular geneticists and neuroscientists insist we are not
fundamentally different from inanimate matter. If people are soulless, why is it
not just as silly to punish people? Shouldn't we heed the creationists, who say
that if you teach children they are animals they will behave like animals?
Should we go even farther than the National Rifle Association bumper
sticker-GUNs DON'T KILL; PEOPLE KILL-and say that not even people kill,
because people are just as mechanical as guns?

These concerns are by no means academic. Cognitive neuroscientists are
sometimes approached by criminal defense lawyers hoping that a wayward
pixel on a brain scan might exonerate their client (a scenario that is wittily
played out in Richard Dooling's novel Brain Storm). When a team of ge¬
neticists found a rare gene that predisposed the men in one family to violent
outbursts, a lawyer for an unrelated murder defendant argued that his client
might have such a gene too. If so, the lawyer argued, «his actions may not have
been a product of total free will,'? When Randy Thornhill and Craig Palmer
argued that rape is a consequence of male reproductive strategies, another
lawyer contemplated using their theory to defend rape suspects.' (Insert your
favorite lawyer joke here.) Biologically sophisticated legal scholars, such as
Owen Jones, have argued that a «rape gene" defense would almost certainly
fail, but the general threat remains that biological explanations will be used to
exonerate wrongdoers." Is this the bright future promised by the sciences of
human nature-it wasn't me, it was my amygdala? Darwin made me do it? The
genes ate my homework?

PEOPLE HOPING THAT an uncaused soul might rescue personal responsibil-
ityare in for a disappointment. In Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth

176/Human Nature with a Human Face

Wanting, the philosopher Dan Dennett points out that the last thing we want
in a soul is freedom to do anything it desires.! I f behavior were chosen by an
utterly free will, then we really couldn't hold people responsible for their ac¬
tions. That entity would not be deterred by the threat of punishment, or be
ashamed by the prospect of opprobrium, or even feel the twinge of guilt that
might inhibit a sinful temptation in the future, because it could always choose
to defy those causes of behavior. We could not hope to reduce evil acts by en¬
acting moral and legal codes, because a free agent, floating in a different plane
from the arrows of cause and effect, would be unaffected by the codes. Moral¬
ity and law would be pointless. We could punish a wrongdoer, but it would be
sheer spite, because it could have no predictable effect on the future behavior
of the wrongdoer or of other people aware of the punishment.

On the other hand, if the soul /^predictably affected by the prospect of es¬
teem and shame or reward and punishment, it is no longer truly free, because
it is compelled (at least probabilistically) to respect those contingencies. What¬
ever converts standards of responsibility into changes in the likelihood of be¬
havior-such as the rule “If the community would think you're a boorish cad
for doing X, don't do X"-can be programmed into an algorithm and imple¬
mented in neural hardware. The soul is superfluous.

Defensive scientists sometimes try to deflect the charge of determinism by
pointing out that behavior is never perfectly predictable but always proba¬
bilistic, even in the dreams of the hardest-headed materialists. (In the heyday
of Skinner's behaviorism, his students formulated the Harvard Law of Animal
Behavior: “Under controlled experimental conditions of temperature, time,
lighting, feeding, and training, the organism will behave as it damned well
pleases.") Even identical twins reared together, who share all of their genes and
most of their environment, are not identical in personality and behavior, just
highly similar. Perhaps the brain amplifies random events at the molecular or
quantum level. Perhaps brains are nonlinear dynamical systems subject to un¬
predictable chaos. Or perhaps the intertwined influences of genes and envi¬
ronment are so complicated that no mortal will ever trace them out with
enough precision to predict behavior exactly.

The less-than-perfect predictability of behavior certainly gives the he to
the cliche that the sciences of human nature are «deterministic" in the mathe¬
matical sense. But it doesn't succeed in allaying the fear that science is eroding
the concept of free will and personal responsibility. 11 is cold comfort to be told
that a man's genes (or his brain or his evolutionary history) made him 99 per¬
cent likely to kill his landlady as opposed to 100 percent. Sure, the behavior
was not strictly preordained, but why should the 1 percent chance of his hav¬
ing done otherwise suddenly make the guy responsible"? In fact, there is no
probability value that, by itself, ushers responsibility back in. One can always
think that there is a 50 percent chance some molecules in Raskolnikov's brain

The Fear of Determinism / 177

went thisaway, compelling him to commit the murder, and a 50 percent
chance they went thataway, compelling him not to. We still have nothing like
free will, and no concept of responsibility that promises to reduce harmful acts.
Hume noted the dilemma inherent in equating the problem of moral responsi¬
bility with the problem ofwhether behavior has a physical cause: either our ac¬
tions are determined, in which case we are not responsible for them, or they are
the result of random events, in which case we are not responsible for them.

people who hope that a ban on biological explanations might restore per¬
sonal responsibility are in for the biggest disappointment of all. The most ris¬
ible pretexts for bad behavior in recent decades have come not from biological
determinism but from environmental determinism: the abuse excuse, the
Twinkie defense, black rage, pornography poisoning, societal sickness, media
violence, rock lyrics, and different cultural mores (recently used by one lawyer
to defend a Gypsy con artist and by another to defend a Canadian Indian woman
who murdered her boyfriend)," Just in the week I wrote this paragraph, two new
examples appeared in the newspapers. One is from a clinical psychologist who
"seeks out a dialogue" with repeat murderers to help them win mitigation,
clemency, or an appeal. It manages to pack the Blank Slate, the Noble Savage, the
moralistic fallacy,and environmental determinism into a single passage:

Most people don't commit horrendous crimes without profoundly
damaging things happening to them. It isn't that monsters are being
born right and left. It's that children are being born right and left and are
being subjected to horrible things. As a consequence, they end up doing
horrible things. And I would much rather live in that world than in a
world where monsters are just born."

The other is about a social work student in Manhattan:

Tiffany F. Goldberg, a 25-year-old from Madison, Wis., was struck on
the head with a chunk of concrete by a stranger this month. Afterward,
she expressed concern for her attacker, speculating that he must have
had a troubled childhood.

Graduate students in social work at Columbia called Ms. Goldberg's
attitude consistent with their outlook on violence. "Society is into blam¬
ing individuals:' said Kristen Miller, 27, one of the students. "Violence is
intergenerationally transmitted."

Evolutionary psychologists are commonly chided for "excusing" men's
promiscuity with the theory that a wandering eye in our ancestors was re¬
warded with a greater number of descendants. They can take heart from a re-

178/Human Nature with a Human Face

cent biography that said Bruce Springsteen’s" self-doubts made him frequently
seek out the sympathy of groupies," a book review that said Woody Allen's
sexual indiscretions "originated in trauma" and an “abusive” relationship with
his mother," and Hillary Clinton’s explanation of her husband's libido in her
infamous interview in Talk:

He was so young, barely 4, when he was scarred by abuse that he can't
even take it out and look at it. There was terrible conflict between his
mother and grandmother. A psychologist once told me that for a boy
being in the middle of a conflict between two women is the worst possi¬
ble situation. There is always the desire to please each one.!'

Mrs. Clinton was raked by the pundits for trying to excuse her husband’s sex¬
ual escapades, though she said not a word about brains, genes, or evolution.
The logic of the condemnation seems to be: If someone tries to explain an act
as an effect of some cause, the explainer is saying that the act was not freely
chosen and that the actor cannot be held responsible.

Environmental determinism is so common that a genre of satire has grown
around it. In a New Yorker cartoon, a woman on a witness stand says, "True, my
husband beat me because of his childhood; but I murdered him because of
mine." In the comic strip Non Sequitur, the directory of a mental health clinic
reads: "1st Floor: Mother's Fault. 2nd Floor: Father's Fault. 3rd Floor: Society's
Fault:' And who can forget the Jets in West Side Story, who imagined explain¬
ing to the local police sergeant, “We’re depraved on accounta we're deprived"?

Dear kindly Sergeant Krupke,

You gotta understand,

It's just our bringin’ up-ke.

That gets us out ofhand.

Our mothers all are junkies.

Our fathers all are drunks.

Golly Moses, natcherly we're punks!

SOMETHING HAS GONE terribly wrong. It is a confusion of explanation with
exculpation. Contrary to what is implied by critics of biological and environ¬
mental theories ofthe causes ofbehavior, to explain behavior is not to exoner¬
ate the behaver. Hillary Clinton may have advanced the dumbest explanation
in the history ofpsychobabble, but she does not deserve the charge oftrying to
excuse the president's behavior. (A New York Times story described Mr. Clin¬
ton's response to people's criticism of his wife: “(I have not made any excuses
for what was inexcusable, and neither has she, believe me: he said, arching his
eyebrows for emphasis.") 12 If behavior is not utterly random, it will have some

The Fear of Determinism / 179

explanation; if behavior were utterly random, we couldn't hold the person re¬
sponsible in any case. So if we everhold people responsible for their behavior,
it will have to be in spite of any causal explanation we feel is warranted,
whether it invokes genes, brains, evolution, media images, self-doubt, bringing
up-ke, or being raised by bickering women. The difference between explaining
behavior and excusing it is captured in the saying "To understand is not to for¬
give:' and has been stressed in different ways by many philosophers, including
Hume, Kant, and Sartre.P Most philosophers believe that unless a person was
literally coerced (that is, someone held a gun to his head), we should consider
his actions to have been freely chosen, even if they were caused by events inside
his skull.

But how can we have both explanation, with its requirement oflawful cau¬
sation, and responsibility, with its requirement of free choice? To have them
both we don't need to resolve the ancient and perhaps unresolvable antinomy
between free will and determinism. We only have to think clearly about what
we want the notion of responsibility to achieve. Whatever may be its inherent
abstract worth, responsibility has an eminently practical function: deterring
harmful behavior. When we say that we hold someone responsible for a
wrongful act, we expect him to punish himself-by compensating the victim,
acquiescing to humiliation, incurring penalties, or expressing credible re-
morse-and we reserve the right to punish him ourselves. Unless a person is
willing to suffer some unpleasant (and hence deterring) consequence, claims
of responsibility are hollow. Richard Nixon was ridiculed when he bowed to
pressure and finally "took responsibility" for the Watergate burglary but did
not accept any costs such as apologizing, resigning, or firing his aides.

One reason to hold someone responsible is to deter the person from com¬
mitting similar acts in the future. But that cannot be the whole story, because
it is different only in degree from the contingencies ofpunishment used by be-
haviorists to modify the behavior of animals. In a social, language-using, rea¬
soning organism, the policy can also deter similar acts by other organisms who
learn of the contingencies and control their behavior so as not to incur the
penalties. That is the ultimate reason we feel compelled to punish elderly Nazi
war criminals, even though there is little 'danger that they would perpetrate
another holocaust if we let them die in their beds in Bolivia. By holding them
responsible-that is, by publicly enforcing a policy of rooting out and punish¬
ing evil wherever and whenever it occurs-we hope to deter others from com¬
mitting comparable evils in the future.

This is not to say that the concept of responsibility is a recommendation
by policy wonks for preventing the largest number of harmful acts at the least
cost. Even if experts had determined that punishing a Nazi would prevent no
future atrocities, or that we could save more lives by diverting the manpower
to catching drunk drivers, we would still want to bring Nazis to justice. The de-

1 80/Human Nature with a Human Face

mand for responsibility can come from a burning sense of just deserts, not
only from literal calculations of how best to deter particular acts.

But punishment even in the pure sense ofjust deserts is ultimately a pol¬
icy for deterrence. It follows from a paradox inherent to the logic of deter¬
rence: though the threat of punishment can deter behavior, if the behavior
does take place the punishment serves no purpose other than pure sadism or
an illogical desire to make the threat credible retroactively. "It won’t bring the
victim back," say the opponents of capital punishment, but that can be said
about any form of punishment. If we start the movie at the point at which a
punishment is to be carried out, it looks like spite, because it is costly to the
punisher and inflicts harm on the punishee without doing anyone any imme¬
diate good. In the middle decades of the twentieth century, the paradox of
punishment and the rise of psychology and psychiatry led some intellectuals
to argue that criminal punishment is a holdover from barbaric times and
should be replaced by therapy and rehabilitation. The position was clear in the
titles of books like George Bernard Shaw's The Crime of Imprisonment and the
psychiatrist KarlMenninger’s The Crime ofPunishment. It was also articulated
by leading jurists such as William O. Douglas, William Brennan, Earl Warren,
and David Bazelon. These radical Krupkeists did not suffer from a fear of de¬
terminism; they welcomed it with open arms.

Fewpeople today argue that criminal punishment is obsolete, even if they
recognize that (other than incapacitating some habitual criminals) it is point¬
less in the short run. That is because if we ever did calculate the short-term ef¬
fects in deciding whether to punish, potential wrongdoers could anticipate
that calculation and factor it into their behavior. They could predict that we
would not find it worthwhile to punish them once it was too late to prevent the
crime, and could act with impunity, calling our bluff. The only solution is to
adopt a resolute policy of punishing wrongdoers regardless of the immediate
effects. If one is genuinely not bluffing about the threat of punishment, there
is no bluff to call. As Oliver Wendell Holmes explained, "If I were having a
philosophical talk with a man I was going to have hanged (or electrocuted) I
should say,‘I don't doubt that your act was inevitable for you but to make it
more avoidable by others we propose to sacrifice you to the common good.
You may regard yourself as a soldier dying for your country if you like. But the
law must keep its promises.' "14 This promise-keeping underlies the policy of
applying justice "as a matter of principle;' regardless of the immediate costs or
even of consistency with common sense. If a death-row inmate attempts sui¬
cide, we speed him to the emergency ward, struggle to resuscitate him, give
him the best modern medicine to help him recuperate, and kill him. We do it
as part of a policy that closes off all possibilities to "cheat justice."

Capital punishment is a vivid illustration of the paradoxical logic of de¬
terrence, but the logic applies to lesser criminal punishments, to personal acts

The Fear of Determinism / 181

of revenge, and to intangible social penalties like ostracism and scorn. Evolu¬
tionary psychologists and game theorists have argued that the deterrence par¬
adox led to the evolution of the emotions that undergird a desire for justice:
the implacable need for retribution, the burning feeling that an evil act knocks
the universe out of balance and can be canceled only by a commensurate pun¬
ishment. People who are emotionally driven to retaliate against those who
cross them, even at a cost to themselves, are more credible adversaries and less
likely to be exploited." Many judicial theorists argue that criminal law is sim¬
ply a controlled implementation ofthe human desire for retribution, designed
to keep it from escalating into cycles of vendetta. The Victorian jurist James
Stephen said that "the criminal law bears the same relation to the urge for re¬
venge as marriage does to the sexual urge."16

Religious conceptions of sin and responsibility simply extend this lever by
implying that any wrongdoing that is undiscovered or unpunished by one's
fellows will be discovered and punished by God. Martin Daly and Margo Wil¬
son sum up the ultimate rationale of our intuitions about responsibility and
godly retribution:

From the perspective of evolutionary psychology, this almost mystical
and seemingly irreducible sort of moral imperative is the output of a
mental mechanism with a straightforward adaptive function: to reckon
justice and administer punishment by a calculus which ensures that vi¬
olators reap no advantage from their misdeeds. The enormous volume
of mystico-religious bafflegab about atonement and penance and divine
justice and the like is the attribution to higher, detached authority of
what is actually a mundane, pragmatic matter: discouraging self-
interested competitive acts by reducing their profitability to nil."

THE DETERRENCE PARADOX also underlies the part ofthe logic of responsi¬
bility that makes us expand or contract it when we learn about a person's men¬
tal state. Modern societies do not just pick whatever policy is most effective at
deterring wrongdoers. For example, if one's only value was to reduce crime,
one could always make the punishments for it especially cruel, as most soci¬
eties did until recently. One could convict people on the basis of an accusation,
a guilty manner, or a forced confession. One could execute the entire family of
a criminal, or his entire clan or village. One could say to one's adversaries, as
Vito Corleone said to the heads of the other crime families in The Godfa¬
ther,"I'm a superstitious man. And if some unlucky accident should befall my
son, if my son is struck by a bolt of lightning, I will blame some of the people
here:'

The reason these practices strike us as barbaric is that they inflict more
harm than is necessary to deter evil in the future. As the political writer Harold

1 82/Human Nature with a Human Face

Laski said, "Civilization means, above all, an unwillingness to inflict unneces¬
sary pain." The problem with broad-spectrum deterrents is that they catch in¬
nocent people in their nets, people who could not have been deterred from
committing an undesirable act to start with (such as the kin of the man who
pulled the trigger, or a bystander during a lightning storm that kills the God¬
father's son). Since punishment of these innocents could not possibly deter
other people like them, the harm has no compensating benefit even in the long
run, and we consider it unjustified. We seek to fine-tune our policy of punish¬
ment so that it applies only to people who could have been deterred by it. They
are the ones we "hold responsible," the ones we feel“deserve” the punishment.

A fine-tuned deterrence policy explains why we exempt certain harm-
causers from punishment. We don't punish those who were unaware that their
acts would lead to harm, because such a policy would do nothing to prevent
similar acts by them or by others in the future. (Chauffeurs cannot be deterred
from driving a president into the line of fire if they have no way of knowing
there will be a line of fire.) We don't apply criminal punishment to the deliri¬
ous, the insane, small children, animals, or inanimate objects, because we
judge that they-and entities similar to them-lack the cognitive apparatus
that could be informed of the policy and could inhibit behavior accordingly.
We exempt these entities from responsibility not because they follow pre¬
dictable laws of biology while everyone else follows mysterious not-laws of
free will. We exempt them because, unlike most adults, they lack a functioning
brain system that can respond to public contingencies of punishment.

And this explains why the usual exemptions from responsibility should
not be granted to all males or all abuse victims or all of humanity, even when
we think we can explain what led them to act as they did. The explanations
may help us understand the parts of the brain that made a behavior tempting,
but they say nothing about the otherparts of the brain (primarily in the pre¬
frontal cortex) that could have inhibited the behavior by anticipating how the
community would respond to it. We are that community, and our major lever
of influence consists in appealing to that inhibitory brain system. Why should
we discard our lever on the system for inhibition just because we are coming
to understand the system for temptation? If you believe we shouldn't, that is
enough to hold people responsible for their actions-without appealing to a
will, a soul, a self, or any other ghost in the machine.

This argument parallels a long-running debate about the most blatant ex¬
ample of a psychological explanation that nullifies responsibility, the insanity
defense.is Many legal systems in the English-speaking world follow the
nineteenth-century M'Naughten rule:

... the jurors ought to be told in all cases that every man is to be pre¬
sumed to be sane, and to possess a sufficient degree of reason to be

The Fear of Determinism / 183

responsible for his crimes, until the contrary be proved to their satisfac¬
tion; and that, to establish a defense on the ground of insanity, it must
be clearlyproved that, at the time of the committing of the act, the party
accused was laboring under such a defect of reason, from disease of the
mind, as not to know the nature and quality of the act he was doing, or,
if he did know it, that he did not know he was doing what was wrong.

This is an excellent characterization of a person who cannot be deterred. If
someone is too addled to know that an act would harm someone, he cannot be
inhibited by the injunction “Don’tharm people, or else!" The M'Naughten
rule aims to forgo spiteful punishment-retribution that harms the perpetra¬
tor with no hope of deterring him or people similar to him.

The insanity defense achieved its present notoriety, with dueling rent-a-
shrinks and ingenious abuse excuses, when it was expanded from a practical
test of whe ther the cognitive system responding to deterrence is working to the
more nebulous tests of what can be said to have produced the behavior. In
the 1954 Durham decision, Bazelon invoked “the science of psychiatry" and
«the science of psychology" to create a new basis for the insanity defense:

The rule we now hold is simply that an accused is not criminally re¬
sponsible if his unlawful act was the product of mental disease or men¬
tal defect.

Unless one believes that ordinary acts are chosen by a ghost in the machine, all
acts are products of cognitive and emotional systems in the brain. Criminal
acts are relatively rare-if everyone in a defendant's shoes acted as he did, the
law against what he did would be repealed-so heinous acts will often be
products of a brain system that is in someway different from the norm, and the
behavior can be construed as “a product of mental disease or mental defect."
The Durham decision and similar insanity rules, by distinguishing behavior
that is a product of a brain condition from behavior that is something else,
threatens to turn every advance in our understanding of the mind into an ero¬
sion of responsibility.

Now, some discoveries about the mind and brain really could have an im¬
pact on our attitudes toward responsibility-but they may call for expanding
the domain of responsibility, not contracting it. Suppose desires that some¬
times culminate in the harassment and battering of women are present in
many men. Does that really mean that men should be punished more leniently
for such crimes, because they can't help it? Or does it mean they should be
punished more surely and severely, because that is the best way to counteract
a strong or widespread urge? Suppose a vicious psychopath is found to have a
defective sense of sympathy, which makes it harder for him to appreciate the

184/Human Nature with a Human Face

suffering of his victims. Should we mitigate the punishment because he has di¬
minished capacity? Or should we make the punishment more sure and severe
to teach him a lesson in the only language he understands?

Why do people's intuitions go in opposite directions-both “If he has
trouble controlling himself, he should be punished more leniently" and “If he
has trouble controlling himself, he should be punished more severely"? It goes
back to the deterrence paradox. Suppose some people need a threat of one lash
with a wet noodle to deter them from parking in front of a fire hydrant. Sup¬
pose people with a bad gene, a bad brain, or a bad childhood need the threat
of ten lashes. A policy that punishes illegal parkers with nine lashes will cause
unnecessary suffering and not solve the problem: nine lashes is more than nec¬
essary to deter ordinary people and less than necessary to deter defective peo¬
ple. Only a penalty of ten lashes can reduce both illegal parking and lashing:
everyone will be deterred, no one will block hydrants, and no one will get
whipped. So, paradoxically, the two extreme policies (harsh punishment and
no punishment) are defensible and the intermediate ones are not. Of course,
people's deterrence thresholds in real life aren't pinned at just two values but
are broadly distributed (one lash for some people, two for others, and so on),
so many intermediate levels of punishment will be defensible, depending on
how one weights the benefits of deterring wrongdoing against the costs of in¬
flicting harm.

Even for those who are completely undeterrable, because of frontal-lobe
damage, genes for psychopathy, or any other putative cause, we do not have to
allow lawyers to loose them on the rest of us. We already have a mechanism for
those likely to harm themselves or others but who do not respond to the carrots
and sticks of the criminal justice system: involuntary civil commitment, in
which we trade off some guarantees of civil liberties against the security of
being protected from likely predators. In all these decisions, the sciences of
human nature can help estimate the distribution of deterrabilities, but they can¬
not weight the conflicting values of avoiding the greatest amount of unneces¬
sary punishment and preventing the greatest amount of future wrongdoing. 19

I do not claim to have solved the problem of free will, only to have shown
that we don't need to solve it to preserve personal responsibility in the face of
an increasing understanding of the causes of behavior. Nor do I argue that
deterrence is the only way to encourage virtue, just that we should recognize
it as the active ingredient that makes responsibility worth keeping. Most of
all, I hope I have, dispelled two fallacies that have allowed the sciences of
human nature to sow unnecessary fear. The first fallacy is that biological ex¬
planations corrode responsibility in a way that environmental explanations
do not. The second fallacy is that causal explanations (both biological and en¬
vironmental) corrode responsibility in away that a belief in an uncaused will
or soul does not.

The Fear of Determinism / 185

Chapter 11

The Fear of Nihilism

THE FINAL FEAR of biological explanations of the mind is that they may
strip our lives of meaning and purpose. If we are just machines that let our
genes make copies of themselves, if our joys and satisfactions are just bio¬
chemical events that will someday sputter out for good, if life was not created
for a higher purpose and directed toward a noble goal, then why go on living?
Life as we treasure it would be sham, a Potemkin village with only a facade of
value and worth.

The fear comes in two versions, religious and secular. A sophisticated ver¬
sion of the religious concern was formulated by Pope John Paul II in a 1996
address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, «Truth Cannot Contradict
Truth,"! The Pope acknowledged that Darwin's theory of evolution is "more
than just a hypothesis;' because converging discoveries in many independent
fields, "neither sought nor fabricated;' argue in its favor. But he drew the line
at «the spiritual soul;' a transition in the evolution of humans that amounted
to an «ontological leap" unobservable by science. The spirit could not have
emerged "from the forces of living matter;' because that cannot «ground the
dignity of the person":

Man is the only creature on earth that God has wanted for its own
sake.... In other terms, the human individual cannot be subordinated
as a pure means or a pure instrument, either to the species or to soci¬
ety; he has value per se. He is a person. With his intellect and his will, he
is capable of forming a relationship of communion, solidarity and self¬
giving with his peers.... Man is called to enter into a relationship of
knowledge and love with God himself, a relationship which will find its
complete fulfillment beyond time, in eternity....

It is by virtue of his spiritual soul that the whole person possesses
such a dignity even in his body.... If the human body take its origin

186/Human Nature with a Human Face

from pre-existent living matter, the spiritual soul is immediately cre¬
ated by God_Consequently, theories of evolution which, in accor¬

dance with the philosophies inspiring them, consider the spirit as
emerging from the forces of living matter or as a mere epiphenomenon
of this matter, are incompatible with the truth about man. Nor are they
able to ground the dignity of the person.

In other words, if scientists are right that the mind emerged from living mat¬
ter, we would have to give up the value and dignity of the individual, solidar¬
ity and selflessness with regard to our fellow humans, and the higher purpose
of realizing these values through the love of God and knowledge of his plans.
Nothing would keep us from a life of callous exploitation and cynical self-
centeredness.

Needless to say, debating the Pope is the ultimate exercise in futility. The
point of this section is not to refute his doctrines, nor is it to condemn reli¬
gion or argue against the existence of God. Religions have provided comfort,
community, and moral guidance to countless people, and some biologists
argue that a sophisticated deism, toward which many religions are evolving,
can be made compatible with an evolutionary understanding of the mind
and human nature.' My goal is defensive: to refute the accusation that a ma¬
terialistic view of the mind is inherently amoral and that religious concep¬
tions are to be favored because they are inherently more humane.

Even the most atheistic scientists do not, of course, advocate a callous
amorality. The brain may be a physical system made of ordinary matter, but
that matter is organized in such a way as to give rise to a sentient organism
with a capacity to feel pleasure and pain. And that in turn sets the stage for
the emergence of morality. The reason is succinctly explained in the comic
strip Calvin and Hobbes (seep. 188).

The feline Hobbes, like his human namesake, has shown why an amoral
egoist is in an untenable position. He is better off if he never gets shoved into
the mud, but he can hardly demand that others refrain from shoving him if he
himself is not willing to forgo shoving others. And since one is better off not
shoving and not getting shoved than shoving and getting shoved, it pays to in¬
sist on a moral code, even if the price is adhering to it oneself. As moral
philosophers through the ages have pointed out, a philosophy of living based
on “Not everyone, just me!" falls apart as soon as one sees oneself from an ob-
jective standpoint as a person just like others. 11 is like insisting that«here;' the
point in space one happens to be occupying at the moment, is a special place
in the universe.'

The dynamic between Calvin and Hobbes (the cartoon characters) is in¬
herent to social organisms, and there are reasons to believe that the solution

The Fear of Nihilism / 187

GET WHAT TOU CAM XHIUE
THE GEKiMSfe GC0D-THKT5
WHAT Z SWWSHT MAKES
RIGHT.' THE WINNERS WRITE
Tit HISTORT BCCkS

Calvin and Hobbes © Watterson. Reprinted with permission of Universal Press Syndicate.

All rights reserved.

to it-a moral sense-evolved in our species rather than having to be de¬
duced from scratch by each of us after we've picked ourselves up out of the
mud." Children as young as a year and a half spontaneously give toys, prof¬
fer help, and try to comfort adults or other children who are visibly dis¬
tressed.' People in all cultures distinguish right from wrong, have a sense of
fairness, help one another, impose rights and obligations, believe that wrongs
should be redressed, and proscribe rape, murder, and some kinds of vio¬
lence." These normal sentiments are conspicuous by their absence in the
aberrant individuals we call psychopaths.' The alternative, then, to the reli¬
gious theory of the source of values is that evolution endowed us with a
moral sense, and we have expanded its circle of application over the course of
history through reason (grasping the logical interchangeability of our inter¬
ests and others'), knowledge (learning of the advantages of cooperation over
the long term), and sympathy (having experiences that allow us to feel other
people's pain).

188/Human Nature with a Human Face

How can we tell which theory is preferable? A thought experiment can pit
them against each other. What would be the right thing to do if God had com¬
manded people to be selfish and cruel rather than generous and kind? Those
who root their values in religion would have to say that we ought to be selfish
and cruel. Those who appeal to a moral sense would say that we ought to re¬
ject God's command. This shows-I hope-that it is our moral sense that de¬
serves priority."

This thought experiment is not just a logical brainteaser of the kind
beloved by thirteen-year-old atheists, such as why God cares how we behave if
he can see the future and already knows. The history of religion shows that
God hos commanded people to do all manner of selfish and cruel acts: mas¬
sacre Midianites and abduct their women, stone prostitutes, execute homo¬
sexuals, burn witches, slay heretics and infidels, throw Protestants out of
windows, withhold medicine from dying children, shoot up abortion clinics,
hunt down Salman Rushdie, blow themselves up in marketplaces, and crash
airplanes into skyscrapers. Recall that even Hitler thought he was carrying out
the will of God.? The recurrence of evil acts committed in the name of God
shows that they are not random perversions. An omnipotent authority that no
one can see is a useful backer for malevolent leaders hoping to enlist holy war¬
riors. And since unverifiable beliefs have to be passed along from parents and
peers rather than discovered in the world, they differ from group to group and
become divisive identity badges.

And who says the doctrine of the soul is more humane than the under¬
standing of the mind as a physical organ? I see no dignity in letting people die
of hepatitis or be ravaged by Parkinson’s disease when a cure may lie in re¬
search on stem cells that religious movements seek to ban because it uses balls
of cells that have made the "ontological leap" to "spiritual souls." Sources of
immense misery such as Alzheimer's disease, major depression, and schizo¬
phrenia will be alleviated not by treating thought and emotion as manifesta¬
tions of an immaterial soul but by treating them as manifestations of
physiology and genetics. 10

Finally, the doctrine of a soul that outlives the body is anything but righ¬
teous, because it necessarily devalues the lives we live on this earth. When Susan
Smith sent her two young.sons to the bottom of a lake, she eased her conscience
with the rationalization that "my children deserve to have the best, and now they
will.” Allusions to a happy afterlife are typical in the final letters of parents who
take their children's lives before taking their own,'! and we have recently been
reminded of how such beliefs embolden suicide bombers and kamikaze hijack¬
ers. This is why we should reject the argument that if people stopped believing
in divine retribution they would do evil with impunity. Yes, if nonbelievers
thought they could elude the legal system, the opprobrium of their communi-

The Fear of Nihilism / 189

ties, and their own consciences, they would not be deterred by the threat of
spending eternity in hell. But they would also not be tempted to massacre thou¬
sands of people by the promise of spending eternity in heaven.

Even the emotional comfort of a belief in an afterlife can go both ways.
Would life lose its purpose if we ceased to exist when our brains die? On the
contrary, nothing invests life with more meaning than the realization that
every moment of sentience is a precious gift. How many fights have been
averted, how many friendships renewed, how many hours not squandered,
how many gestures of affection offered, because we sometimes remind our¬
selves that "life is short"?

WHY DO secular thinkers fear that biology drains life of meaning? It is be¬
cause biology seems to deflate the values we most cherish. If the reason we love
our children is that a squirt of oxytocin in the brain compels us to protect our
genetic investment, wouldn’t the nobility of parenthood be undermined and
its sacrifices devalued? If sympathy, trust, and a yearning for justice evolved as
a way to earn favors and deter cheaters, wouldn’t that imply that there are re¬
ally no such things as altruism and justice for their own sake? We sneer at the
philanthropist who profits from his donation because of the tax savings, the
televangelist who thunders against sin but visits prostitutes, the politician who
defends the downtrodden only when the cameras are rolling, and the sensitive
new-age guy who backs feminism because it's a good way to attract women.
Evolutionary psychology seems to be saying that we are all such hypocrites, all
the time.

The fear that scientific knowledge undermines human values reminds me
of the opening scene in Annie Hall, in which the young Alvy Singer has been
taken to the family doctor:

MOTHER: He's been depressed. All of a sudden, he can't do anything.

DOCTOR: Why are you depressed, Alvy?

MOTHER: Tell Dr. Flicker. [Answers for him.] It's something he read.

DOCTOR: Something he-read, huh?

ALVY: [Head down.] The universe is expanding.

DOCTOR: The universe is expanding?

ALVY: Well, the universe is everything, and if it's expanding, someday it
will break apart and that would be the end of everything!

MOTHER: What is that your business? [To the doctor.] He stopped
doing his homework.

ALVY: What's the point?

The scene is funny because Alvy has confused two levels of analysis: the scale
of billions of years with which we measure the universe, and the scale of de-

1901 Human Nature with a Human Face

cades, years, and days with which we measure our lives. As Alvy's mother
points out, "What has the universe got to do with it? You're here in Brooklyn!
Brooklyn is not expanding!"

People who are depressed at the thought that all our motives are selfish are
as confused as Alvy, They have mixed up ultimate causation (why something
evolved by natural selection) with proximate causation (how the entity works
here and now). The mix-up is natural because the two explanations can look
so much alike.

Richard Dawkins showed that a good way to understand the logic of
natural selection is to imagine that genes are agents with selfish motives. No
one should begrudge him the metaphor, but it contains a trap for the unwary.
The genes have metaphorical motives-making copies of themselves-and
the organisms they design have real motives. But they are not the same
motives. Sometimes the most selfish thing a gene can do is wire unselfish
motives into a human brain-heartfelt, unstinting, deep-in-the-marrow
unselfishness. The love of children (who carry one's genes into posterity), a
faithful spouse (whose genetic fate is identical to one's own), and friends
and allies (who trust you if you're trustworthy) can be bottomless and un¬
impeachable as far as we humans are concerned (proximate level), even if
it is metaphorically self-serving as far as the genes are concerned (ultimate
level).

I suspect there is another reason why the explanations are so easily con¬
fused. We all know that people sometimes have ulterior motives. They may be
publicly generous but privately greedy, publicly pious but privately cynical,
publicly platonic but privately lusting. Freud accustomed us to the idea that
ulterior motives are pervasive in behavior, exerting their effects from an inac¬
cessible stratum of the mind. Combine this with the common misconception
that the genes are a kind of essence or core of the person, and you get a mon¬
grel of Dawkins and Freud: the idea that the metaphorical motives of the genes
are the deep, unconscious, ulterior motives of the person. That is an error.
Brooklyn is not expanding.

Even people who can keep genes and people apart in their minds might find
themselves depressed. Psychology has taught us that aspects of our experience
may be figments, artifacts of how information is processed in the brain. The
difference in kind between our experience of red and our experience of green
does not mirror any difference in kind in lightwaves in the world-the wave¬
lengths of light, which give rise to our perception of hue, form a smooth con¬
tinuum. Red and green, perceived as qualitatively different properties, are
constructs of the chemistry and circuitry of our nervous system. They could
be absent in an organism with different photopigments or wiring; indeed,
people with the most common form of colorblindness are just such organ¬
isms. And the emotional coloring of an object is as much a figment as its phys-

The Fear of Nihilism / 191

ical coloring. The sweetness of fruit, the scariness of heights, and the vileness
of carrion are fancies of a nervous system that evolved to react to those objects
in adaptive ways.

The sciences of human nature seem to imply that the same is true of
right and wrong, merit and worthlessness, beauty and ugliness, holiness
and baseness. They are neural constructs, movies we project onto the interior
of our skulls, ways to tickle the pleasure centers of the brain, with no more
reality than the difference between red and green. When Marley’s ghost asked
Scrooge why he doubted his senses, he said, "Because a little thing affects
them. A slight disorder of the stomach makes them cheats. You may be an
undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an
underdone potato. There's more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever
you are!" Science seems to be saying that the same is true of everything we
value.

But just because our brains are prepared to think in certain ways, it does
not follow that the objects of those thoughts are fictitious. Many of our facul¬
ties evolved to mesh with real entities in the world. Our perception of depth is
the product of complicated circuitry in the brain, circuitry that is absent from
other species. But that does not mean that there aren't real trees and cliffs out
there, or that the world is as flat as a pancake. And so it may be with more ab¬
stract entities. Humans, like many animals, appear to have an innate sense of
number, which can be explained by the advantages of reasoning about nu-
merosity during our evolutionary history. (For example, if three bears go into
a cave and two come out, is it safe to enter?) But the mere fact that a number
faculty evolved does not mean that numbers are hallucinations. According to
the Platonist conception of number favored by many mathematicians and
philosophers, entities such as numbers and shapes have an existence inde¬
pendent of minds. The number three is not invented out of whole cloth; it has
real properties that can be discovered and explored. No rational creature
equipped with circuitry to understand the concept "two" and the concept of
addition could discover that two plus one equals anything other than three.
That is why we expect similar bodies of mathematical results to emerge from
different cultures or even different planets. If so, the number sense evolved to
grasp abstract truths in the world that exist independently of the minds that
grasp them.

Perhaps the same argument can be made for morality. According to the
theory of moral realism, right and wrong exist, and have an inherent logic that
licenses some moral arguments and not others.'? The world presents us with
non-zero-sum games in which it is better for both parties to act unselfishly
than for both to act selfishly (better not to shove and not to be shoved than to
shove and be shoved). Given the goal of being better off, certain conditions

192/Human Nature with a Human Face

follow necessarily. No creature equipped with circuitry to understand that it is
immoral for you to hurt me could discover anything but that it is immoral for
me to hurt you. As with numbers and the number sense, we would expect
moral systems to evolve toward similar conclusions in different cultures or
even different planets. And in fact the Golden Rule has been rediscovered
many times: by the authors of Leviticus and the Mahabharata; by Hillel, Jesus,
and Confucius; by the Stoic philosophers of the Roman Empire; by social con¬
tract theorists such as Hobbes, Rousseau, and Locke; and by moral philoso¬
phers such as Kant in his categorical imperative. 13 Our moral sense may have
evolved to mesh with an intrinsic logic of ethics rather than concocting it in
our heads out of nothing.

But even if the Platonic existence of moral logic is too rich for your blood,
you can still see morality as something more than a social convention or reli¬
gious dogma. Whatever its ontological status may be, a moral sense is part of
the standard equipment of the human mind. It's the only mind we've got, and
we have no choice but to take its intuitions seriously. If we are so constituted
that we cannot help but think in moral terms (at least some of the time and to¬
ward some people), then morality is as real for us as if it were decreed by the
Almighty or written into the cosmos. And so it is with other human values like
love, truth, and beauty. Could we ever know whether they are really "out there"
or whether we just think they are out there because the human brain makes it
impossible not to think they are out there? And how bad would it be if they
were inherentto the human way of thinking? Perhaps we should reflect on our
condition as Kant did in his Critique of Practical Reason: «Two things fill the
mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe. the oftener and more
steadily we reflect on them: the starry heavens above and the moral law
within."

IN the past four chapters I have shown why new ideas from the sciences of
human nature do not undermine humane values. On the contrary, they pre¬
sent opportunities to sharpen our ethical reasoning and put those values on a
firmer foundation. In a nutshell:

• It is a bad idea to say that discrimination is wrong only because the traits
of all people are indistinguishable.

• It is a bad idea to say that violence and exploitation are wrong only be¬
cause people are not naturally inclined to them.

• It is a bad idea to say that people are responsible for their actions only be¬
cause the causes of those actions are mysterious.

• And it is a bad idea to say that our motives are meaningful in a personal
sense only because they are inexplicable in a biological sense.

The Fear of Nihilism / 193

These are bad ideas because they make our values hostages to fortune, imply¬
ing that someday factual discoveries could make them obsolete. And they are
bad ideas because they conceal the downsides of denying human nature: per¬
secution of the successful, intrusive social engineering, the writing off of suf¬
fering in other cultures, an incomprehension of the logic of justice, and the
devaluing of human life on earth.

194/Human Nature with a Human Face

PART IV

KNOW THYSELF

N oWthat I have attempted to make the very idea of human nature re¬
spectable, it is time to say something about what it is and what dif¬
ference it makes for our public and private lives. The chapters in Part
IV present some current ideas about the design specs of the basic human fac¬
ulties. These are not just topics in a psychology curriculum but have implica¬
tions for many arenas of public discourse. Ideas about the contents of
cognition-concepts, words, and images-shed light on the roots of preju¬
dice, on the media, and on the arts. Ideas about the capacity for reason can
enter into our policies of education and applications of technology. Ideas
about social relations are relevant to the family, to sexuality, to social organi¬
zation, and to crime. Ideas about the moral sense inform the way we evaluate
political movements and how we trade off one value against another.

In each of these arenas, people always appeal to some conception of
human nature, whether they acknowledge it or not. The problem is that the
conceptions are often based on gut feelings, folk theories, and archaic versions
of biology. My goal is to make these conceptions explicit, to suggest what is
right and wrong about them, and to spell out some of the implications. Ideas
about human nature cannot, on their own, resolve perplexing controversies or
determine public policy. But without such ideas we are not playing with a full
deck and are vulnerable to unnecessary befuddlement. As the biologist
Richard Alexander has noted, "Evolution is surely most deterministic for those
still unaware of it." 1

Know Thyself / 195

Chapter 12

In Touch with Reality

What a piece of work is a man!

How noble in reason!

How infinite in faculty!

In form, in moving, how express and admirable!

In action, how like an angel!

In apprehension, how like a god!

-William Shakespeare

THE starting point for acknowledging human nature is a sheer awe and
humility in the face of the staggering complexity of its source, the brain. Or¬
ganized by the three billion bases of our genome and shaped by hundreds of
millions of years of evolution, the brain is a network of unimaginable intri¬
cacy: a hundred billion neurons linked by a hundred trillion connections,
woven into a convoluted three-dimensional architecture. Humbling, too, is
the complexity of what it does. Even the mundane talents we share with
other primates-walking, grasping, recognizing-are solutions to engineering
problems at or beyond the cutting edge of artificial intelligence. The talents
that are human birthrights-speaking and understanding, using common
sense, teaching children, inferring other people's motives-will probably not
be duplicated by machines in our lifetime, if ever. All this should serve as a
counterweight to the image of the mind as formless raw material and to peo¬
ple as insignificant atoms making up the complex being we call«society."

The human brain equips us to thrive in a world of objects, living things,
and other people. Those entities have a large impact on our well-being, and
one would expect the brain to be well suited to detecting them and their pow¬
ers. Failing to recognize a steep precipice or a hungry panther or a jealous
spouse can have significant negative consequences for biological fitness, to put
it mildly. The fantastic complexity of the brain is there in part to register con¬
sequential facts about the world around us.

In Touch with Reality / 197

But this truism has been rejected by many sectors of modern intellectual
life. According to the relativistic wisdom prevailing in much of academia
today, reality is socially constructed by the use of language, stereotypes, and
media images. The idea that people have access to facts about the world is
naive, say the proponents of social constructionism, science studies, cultural
studies, critical theory, postmodernism, and deconstructionism. In their view,
observations are always infected by theories, and theories are saturated with
ideology and political doctrines, so anyone who claims to have the facts or
know the truth is just trying to exert power over everyone else.

Relativism is entwined with the doctrine of the Blank Slate in two ways.
One is that relativists have a penny-pinching theory of psychology in which
the mind has no mechanisms designed to grasp reality; all it can do is passively
download words, images, and stereotypes from the surrounding culture. The
other is the relativists' attitude toward science. Most scientists regard their
work as an extension of our everyday ability to figure out what is out there and
how things work. Telescopes and microscopes amplify the visual system; theo¬
ries formalize our hunches about cause and effect; experiments refine our
drive to gather evidence about events we cannot witness directly. Relativist
movements agree that science is perception and cognition writ large, but they
draw the opposite conclusion: that scientists, like laypeople, are unequipped to
grasp an objective reality. Instead, their advocates say,"Western science is only
one way of describing reality, nature, and the way things work-a very effec¬
tive way, certainly, for the production of goods and profits, but unsatisfactory
in most other respects. It is an imperialist arrogance which ignores the sciences
and insights of most other cultures and times,"! Nowhere is this more signifi¬
cant than in the scientific study of politically charged topics such as race, gen¬
der, violence, and social organization. Appealing to "facts" or "the truth" in
connection with these topics is just a ruse, the relativists say, because there is
no "truth" in the sense of an objective yardstick independent of cultural and
political presuppositions.

Skepticism about the soundness of people's mental faculties also deter¬
mines whether one should respect ordinary people's tastes and opinions (even
those we don’t much like) or treat the people as dupes of an insidious com¬
mercial culture. According to relativist doctrines like "false consciousness;'
"inauthentic preferences;' and "interiorized authority;' people may be mis¬
taken about their own desires. If so, it would undermine the assumptions
behind democracy, which gives ultimate authority to the preferences of the
majority of a population, and the assumptions behind market economies,
which treat people as the best judges of how they should allocate their own re¬
sources. Perhaps not coincidentally, it elevates the scholars and artists who an¬
alyze the use of language and images in society, because only they can unmask
the ways in which such media mislead and corrupt.

198 / Know Thyself

This chapter is about the assumptions about cognition-in particular)
concepts, words, and images-that underlie recent relativistic movements in
intellectual life. The best way to introduce the argument is with examples
from the study of perception, our most immediate connection to the world.
They immediately show that the question of whether reality is socially con¬
structed or directly available has not been properly framed. Neither alterna¬
tive is correct.

Relativists have a point when they say that we don't just open our eyes and
apprehend reality) as if perception were a window through which the soul
gazes at the world. The idea that we just see things as they are is called naive
realism, and it was refuted by skeptical philosophers thousands of years
ago with the help of asimple phenomenon: visual illusions. Ourvisual systems
can play tricks on us, and that is enough to prove they are gadgets, not
pipelines to the truth. Here are
two of my favorites. In Roger
Shepard's "Turning the Tables'?

(right), the two parallelograms
are identical in size and shape.

In Edward Adelson's "Checker
Shadow Illusion'? (below) the
light square in the middle of the
shadow (B) is the same shade of
gray as the dark squares outside
the shadow (A):

But just because the world
we know is a construct of our
brain, that does not mean it is
an arbitrary construet-a phan¬
tasm created by expectations
or the social context. Our per¬
ceptual systems are designed
to register aspects of the exter¬
nal world that were important
to our survival, like the sizes,
shapes, and materials of ob¬
jects. They need a complex

design to accomplish this feat because the retinal image is not a replica of
the world. The projection of an object on the retina grows, shrinks, and warps
as the object moves around; color and brightness fluctuate as the lighting
changes from sun to clouds or from indoor to outdoor light. But some¬
how the brain solves these maddening problems. It works as if it were reas¬
oning backwards from the retinal image to hypotheses about reality, using

In Touch with Reality / 199

geometry, optics, probability theory, and assumptions about the world. Most
of the time the system works: people don't usually bump into trees or bite into
rocks.

But occasionally the brain is fooled. The ground stretching away from our
feet projects an image from the bottom to the center of our visual field. As a re¬
sult, the brain often interprets down-up in the visual field as near-far in the
world, especially when reinforced by other perspective cues such as occluded
parts (like the hidden table legs). Objects stretching away from the viewer get
foreshortened by projection, and the brain compensates for this, so we tend to
see a given distance running up-and-down in the visual field as coming from
a longer object than the same distance running left-to-right. And that makes
us see the lengths and widths differently in the turned tables. By similar logic,
objects in shadow reflect less light onto our retinas than objects in full illumi¬
nation. Our brains compensate, making us see a given shade of gray as lighter
when it is in shadow than when it is in sunshine. In each case we may see the
lines and patches on the page incorrectly, but that is only because our visual
systems are working very hard to see them as coming from a real world. Like a
policeman framing a suspect, Shepard and Adelson have planted evidence that
would lead a rational but unsuspecting observer to an incorrect conclusion. If
we were in a world of ordinary 3-D objects that had projected those images
onto our retinas, our perceptual experience would be accurate. Adelson ex¬
plains: "As with many so-called illusions, this effect really demonstrates the
success rather than the failure of the visual system. The visual system is not
very good at being a physical light meter, but that is not its purpose. The im¬
portant task is to break the image information down into meaningful compo¬
nents, and thereby perceive the nature of the objects in view"?

It's not that expectations from past experience are irrelevant to percep¬
tion. But their influence is to make our perceptual systems more accurate, not
more arbitrary. In the two words below, we perceive the same shape as an “H”
in the first word and as an “A” in the second:"

THECHT

We see the shapes that way because experience tells us-correctly-that the
odds are high that there really /san “H” in the middle of the first word and an
“A” in the middle of the second, even if that is not true in an atypical case. The
mechanisms ofperception go to a lot of trouble to ensure that what we see cor¬
responds to what is usually out there.

So the demonstrations that refute naive realism most decisively also refute
the idea that the mind is disconnected from reality. There is a third alternative:

200/ Know Thyself

that the brain evolved fallible yet intelligent mechanisms that work, to keep us
in touch with aspects of reality that were relevant to the survival and repro¬
duction of our ancestors. And that is true not just of our perceptual faculties
but of our cognitive faculties. The fact that our cognitive faculties (like our
perceptual faculties) are attuned to the real world is most obvious from their
response to illusions: they recognize the possibility of a breach with reality and
find a way to get at the truth behind the false impression. When we see an oar
that appears to be severed at the water's surface, we know how to tell whether
it really is severed or just looks that way: we can palpate the oar, slide a straight
object along it, or pull on it to see if the submerged part gets left behind. The
concept of truth and reality behind such tests appears to be universal. People
in all cultures distinguish truth from falsity and inner mental life from overt
reality, and try to deduce the presence of unobservable objects from the per¬
ceptible clues they leave behind."

visual perception is the most piquant form of knowledge of the world,
but relativists are less concerned with how we see objects than with how we
categorize them: how we sort our experiences into conceptual categories like
birds, tools, and people. The seemingly innocuous suggestion that the cate¬
gories of the mind correspond to something in reality became a contentious
idea in the twentieth century because some categories-stereotypes of race,
gender, ethnicity, and sexual orientation-can be harmful when they are used
to discriminate or oppress.

The word stereotype originally referred to a kind of printing plate. Its cur¬
rent sense as a pejorative and inaccurate image standing for a category ofpeo-
ple was introduced in 1922 by the journalist Walter Lippmann. Lippmannwas
an important public intellectual who, among other things, helped to found
The New Republic, influenced Woodrow Wilson's policies at the end of World
War I, and wrote some of the first attacks on IQ testing. In his book Public
Opinion, Lippmann fretted about the difficulty of achieving true democracy
in an age in which ordinary people could no longer judge public issues ration¬
ally because they got their information in what we today call sound bites. As
part of this argument, Lippmann proposed that ordinary people's concepts of
social groups were stereotypes: mental pictures that are incomplete, biased, in¬
sensitive to variation, and resistant to disconfirming information.

Lippmann had an immediate influence on social science (though the sub¬
tleties and qualifications of his original argument were forgotten). Psycholo¬
gists gave people lists of ethnic groups and lists of traits and asked them to pair
them up. Sure enough, people linked Jews with "shrewd" and "mercenary;'
Germans with "efficient" and "nationalistic;' Negroes with "superstitious" and
"happy-go-lucky;' and so on.' Such generalizations are pernicious when ap¬
plied to individuals, and though they are still lamentably common in much of

In Touch with Reality / 201

the world, they are now actively avoided by educated people and by main¬
stream public figures.

By the 1970s, many thinkers were not content to note that stereotypes
about categories of people can be inaccurate. They began to insist that the cat¬
egories themselves don't exist other than in our stereotypes. An effective way
to fight racism, sexism, and other kinds of prejudice, in this view, is to deny
that conceptual categories about people have any claim to objective reality. It
would be impossible to believe that homosexuals are effeminate, blacks super¬
stitious, and women passive if there were no such things as categories of ho¬
mosexuals, blacks, or women to begin with. For example, the philosopher
Richard Rorty has written," (The homosexual,' (the Negro,' and 'the female’ are
best seen not as inevitable classifications of human beings but rather as inven¬
tions that have done more harm than good."

For that matter, many writers think, why stop there? Better still to insist
that ^//categories are social constructions and therefore figments, because that
would really make invidious stereotypes figments. Rorty notes with approval
that many thinkers today "go on to suggest that quarks and genes probably are
[inventions] too:’ Postmodernists and other relativists attack truth and objec¬
tivity not so much because they are interested in philosophical problems of
ontology and epistemology but because they feel it is the best way to pull the
rug out from under racists, sexists, and homophobes. The philosopher Ian
Hacking provides a list of almost forty categories that have recently been
claimed to be "socially constructed." The prime examples are race, gender,
masculinity, nature, facts, reality, and the past. But the list has been growing
and now includes authorship, AIDS, brotherhood, choice, danger, dementia,
illness, Indian forests, inequality, the Landsat satellite system, the medicalized
immigrant, the nation-state, quarks, school success, serial homicide, techno¬
logical systems, white-collar crime, women refugees, and Zulu nationalism.
According to Hacking, the common thread is a conviction that the category is
not determined by the nature of things and therefore is not inevitable. The
further implication is that we would be much better off if it were done away
with or radically transformed."

This whole enterprise is based on an unstated theory of human concept
formation: that conceptual categories bear no systematic relation to things in
the world but are socially constructed (and can therefore be reconstructed). Is
it a correct theory? In some cases it has a grain of truth. As we saw in Chapter
4, some categories really are social constructions: they exist only because peo¬
ple tacitly agree to act as if they exist. Examples include money, tenure, citi¬
zenship, decorations for bravery, and the presidency of the United States. loBut
that does not mean that all conceptual categories are socially constructed.
Concept formation has been studied for decades by cognitive psychologists,
and they conclude that most concepts pick out categories of objects in the

202/ Know Thyself

world which had some kind of reality before we ever stopped to think about
them. 11

Yes, every snowflake is unique, and no category will do complete justice to
everyone of its members. But intelligence depends on lumping together things
that share properties, so that we are not flabbergasted by every new thing we
encounter. As William James wrote, “A polyp would be a conceptual thinker if
a feeling of'Hollo! thingumbob again!'ever flitted through its mind." We per¬
ceive some traits of a new object, place it in a mental category, and infer that it
is likely to have the other traits typical of that category, ones we cannot per¬
ceive. If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it probably is a duck. If it's
a duck, it's likely to swim, fly, have a back off which water rolls, and contain
meat that's tasty when wrapped in a pancake with scallions and hoisin sauce.

. This kind of inference works because the world really does contain ducks,
which really do share properties. If we lived in a world in which walking
quacking objects were no more likely to contain meat than did any other ob¬
ject, the category "duck" would be useless and we probably would not have
evolved the ability to form it. If you were to construct a giant spreadsheet in
which the rows and columns were traits that people notice and the cells were
filled in by objects that possess that combination of traits, the pattern of filled
cells would be lumpy. Youwould find lots of entries at the intersection of the
"quacks" row and the "waddles" column but none at the "quacks” row and the
"gallops" column. Once you specify the rows and columns, the lumpiness
comes from the world, not from society or language. It is no coincidence that
the same living things tend to be classified together by the words in European
cultures, the words for plant and animal kinds in other cultures (including
preliterate cultures), and the Linnaean taxa of professional biologists
equipped with calipers, dissecting tools, and DNA sequencers. Ducks, biolo¬
gists say, are several dozen species in the subfamily Anatinae, each with a dis¬
tinct anatomy, an ability to interbreed with other members of their species,
and a common ancestor in evolutionary history.

Most cognitive psychologists believe that conceptual categories come
from two mental processes." One of them notices clumps of entries in the
mental spreadsheet and treats them as categories with fuzzy boundaries, pro¬
totypical members, and overlapping similarities, like the members of a family.
That's why our mental category "duck” can embrace odd ducks that don't
match the prototypical duck, such as lame ducks, who cannot swim or fly,
Muscovy ducks, which have claws and spurs on their feet, and Donald Duck,
who talks and wears clothing. The other mental process looks for crisp rules
and definitions and enters them into chains of reasoning. The second system
can learn that true ducks molt twice a season and have overlapping scales on
their legs and hence that certain birds that look like geese and are called geese
really are ducks. Even when people don't know these facts from academic

In Touch with Reality / 203

biology, they have a strong intuition that species are defined by an internal
essence or hidden trait that lawfully gives rise to its visible features."

Anyone who teaches the psychology of categorization has been hit with
this question from a puzzled student: "You'retelling us that putting things into
categories is rational and makes us smart. But we've always been taught that
putting people into categories is irrational and makes us sexist and racist. If
categorization is so great when we think about ducks and chairs, why is it
so terrible when we think about genders and ethnic groups?" As with many
ingenuous questions from students, this one uncovers a shortcoming in the
literature, not a flaw in their understanding.

The idea that stereotypes are inherently irrational owes more to a conde¬
scension toward ordinary people than it does to good psychological research.
Many researchers, having shown that stereotypes existed in the minds of their
subjects, assumed that the stereotypes had to be irrational, because they were
uncomfortable with the possibility that some trait might be statistically true of
some group. They never actually checked. That began to change in the 1980s,
and now a fair amount is known about the accuracy of stereotypes, u

With some important exceptions, stereotypes are in fact not inaccurate
when assessed against objective benchmarks such as census figures or the re¬
ports of the stereotyped people themselves. People who believe that African
Americans are more likely to be on welfare than whites, that Jews have higher
average incomes than WASPs, that business students are more conservative
than students in the arts, that women are more likely than men to want to lose
weight, and that men are more likely than women to swat a fly with their bare
hands, are not being irrational or bigoted. Those beliefs are correct. People's
stereotypes are generally consistent with the statistics, and in many cases their
bias is to underestimate the real differences between sexes or ethnic groups, is
This does not mean that the stereotyped traits are unchangeable, of course, or
that people think they are unchangeable, only that people perceive the traits
fairly accurately at the time.

Moreover, even when people believe that ethnic groups have characteris¬
tic traits, they are never mindless stereotypers who literally believe that each
and every member of the group possesses those traits. People may think that
Germans are, on average, more efficient than non-Germans, but no one be¬
lieves that every last German is more efficient than every non-German." And
people have no trouble overriding a stereotype when they have good informa¬
tion about an individual. Contrary to a common accusation, teachers' impres¬
sions of their individual pupils are not contaminated by their stereotypes of
race, gender, or socioeconomic status. The teachers' impressions accurately re¬
flect the pupil's performance as measured by objective tests, i?

Now for the important exceptions. Stereotypes can be downright inaccu¬
rate when a person has few or no firsthand encounters with the stereotyped

204 / Know Thyself

group, or belongs to a group that is overtly hostile to the one being judged.
During World War II, when the Russians were allies of the United States and
the Germans were enemies, Americans judged Russians to have more positive
traits than Germans. Soon afterward, when the alliances reversed, Americans
judged Germans to have more positive traits than Russians, is

Also, people's ability to set aside stereotypes when judging an individual is
accomplished by their conscious, deliberate reasoning. When people are dis¬
tracted or put under pressure to respond quickly, they are more likely to judge
that a member of an ethnic group has all the stereotyped traits of the group. 19
This comes from the two-part design of the human categorization system
mentioned earlier. Our network of fuzzy associations naturally reverts to a
stereotype when we first encounter an individual. But our rule-based catego-
rizer can block out those associations and make deductions based on the rele¬
vant facts about that individual. It can do so either for practical reasons, when
information about a group-wide average is less diagnostic than information
about the individual, or for social and moral reasons, out of respect for the im¬
perative that one ought to ignore certain group-wide averages when judging
an individual.

The upshot of this research is not that stereotypes are always accurate but
that they are not always false, or even usually false. This is just what we would
expect if human categorization-like the rest of the mind-is an adaptation
that keeps track of aspects ofthe world that are relevant to our long-term well¬
being. As the social psychologist Roger Brown pointed out, the main differ¬
ence between categories of people and categories of other things is that when
you use a prototypical exemplar to stand for a category of things, no one takes
offense. When Webster's dictionary used a sparrow to stand for all birds, "emus
and ostriches and penguins and eagles did not go on the attack.” But just imag¬
ine what would have happened if Webster's had used a picture of a soccer
mom to illustrate woman and a picture of a business executive to illustrate
man. Brown remarks, "Ofcourse, people would be right to take offense since a
prototype can never represent the variation that exists in natural categories.
It's just that birds don't care but people do."?

What are the implications ofthe fact that many stereotypes are statistically
accurate? One is that contemporary scientific research on sex differences can¬
not be dismissed just because some of the findings are consistent with tradi¬
tional stereotypes of men and women. Some parts of those stereotypes may be
false, but the mere fact that they are stereotypes does not prove that they are
false in every respect.

The partial accuracy of many stereotypes does not, of course, mean that
racism, sexism, and ethnic prejudice are acceptable. Quite apart from the
democratic principle that in the public sphere people should be treated as
individuals, there are good reasons to be concerned about stereotypes.

In Touch with Reality / 205

Stereotypes based on hostile depictions rather than on firsthand experience
are bound to be inaccurate. And some stereotypes are accurate only because of
self-fulfilling prophecies. Forty years ago it may have been factually correct
that few women and African Americans were qualified to be chief executives or
presidential candidates. But that was only because of barriers that prevented
them from attaining those qualifications, such as university policies that re¬
fused them admission out of a belief that they were not qualified. The institu¬
tional barriers had to be dismantled before the facts could change. The good
news is that when the facts do change, people's stereotypes can change with
them.

What about policies that go farther and actively compensate for prejudi¬
cial stereotypes, such as quotas and preferences that favor underrepresented
groups? Some defenders of these policies assume that gatekeepers are incur¬
ably afflicted with baseless prejudices, and that quotas must be kept in place
forever to neutralize their effects. The research on stereotype accuracy refutes
that argument. Nonetheless, the research might support a different argument
for preferences and other gender- and color-sensitive policies. Stereotypes,
even when they are accurate, might be self-fulfilling, and not just in the obvi¬
ous case of institutionalized barriers like those that kept women and African
Americans out of universities and professions. Many people have heard of the
Pygmalion effect, in which people perform as other people (such as teachers)
expect them to perform. As it happens, the Pygmalion effect appears to be
small or nonexistent, but there are more subtle forms of self-fulfilling prophe¬
cies." If subjective decisions about people, such as admissions, hiring, credit,
and salaries, are based in part on group-wide averages, they will conspire to
make the rich richer and the poor poorer. Women are marginalized in acade¬
mia, making them genuinely less influential, which increases their marginal¬
ization. African Americans are treated as poorer credit risks and denied credit,
which makes them less likely to succeed, which makes them poorer credit
risks. Race- and gender-sensitive policies, according to arguments by the psy¬
chologist Virginia Valian, the economist Glenn Loury, and the philosopher
James Flynn, may be needed to break the vicious cycle."

Pushing in the other direction is the finding that stereotypes are least ac¬
curate when they pertain to a coalition that is pitted against one's own in hos¬
tile competition. This should make us nervous about identity politics, in
which public institutions identify their members in terms of their race, gender,
and ethnic group and weigh every policy by how it favors one group over an¬
other. In many universities, for example, minority students are earmarked for
special orientation sessions and encouraged to view their entire academic ex¬
perience through the lens of their group and how it has been victimized. By
implicitly pitting one group against another, such policies may cause each
group to brew stereotypes about the other that are more pejorative than the

206/Know Thyself

ones they would develop in personal encounters. As with other policy issues I
examine in this book, the data from the lab do not offer a thumbs-up or
thumbs-down verdict on race- and gender-conscious policies. But by high¬
lighting the features of our psychology that different policies engage, the find¬
ings can make the tradeoffs clearer and the debates better informed.

OF all the faculties that go into the piece of work called man, language may
be the most awe-inspiring. "Remember that you are a human being with a soul
and the divine gift of articulate speech;' Henry Higgins implored Eliza Doolit¬
tle. Galileo's alter ego, humbled by the arts and inventions of his day, com¬
mented on language in its written form:

But surpassing all stupendous inventions, what sublimity of mind was
his who dreamed of finding means to communicate his deepest
thoughts to any other person, though distant by mighty intervals of
place and time! Of talking with those who are in India; of speaking to
those who are not yet born and will not be born for a thousand or ten
thousand years; and with what facility, by the different arrangements of
twenty characters upon a pagel"

But a funny thing happened to language in intellectual life. Rather than
being appreciated for its ability to communicate thought, it was condemned
for its power to constrain thought. Famous quotations from two philosophers
capture the anxiety. "We have to cease to think if we refuse to do it in the pris-
onhouse of language;' wrote Friedrich Nietzsche. "The limits of my language
mean the limits of my world;' wrote Fudwig Wittgenstein.

How could language exert this stranglehold? 11 would if words and phrases
were the medium of thought itself, an idea that falls naturally out of the Blank
Slate. If there is nothing in the intellect that was not first in the senses, then
words picked up by the ears are the obvious source of any abstract thought that
cannot be reduced to sights, smells, or other sounds. Watson tried to explain
thinking as microscopic movements of the mouth and throat; Skinner hoped
his 1957 book Verbal Behavior, which explained language as a repertoire of re¬
warded responses, would bridge the gap between pigeons and people.

The other social sciences also tended to equate language with thought.
Boas's student Edward Sapir called attention to differences in how languages
carve up the world into categories, and Sapir's student Benjamin Whorf
stretched those observations into the famous Finguistic Determinism hypoth¬
esis: "We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as
we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it in this
way-an agreement that holds throughout our speech community and is cod¬
ified in the patterns of our language. The agreement is, of course, an implicit

In Touch with Reality / 207

and unstated one, but its terms are absolutely obtigatoty.:" More recently, the
anthropologist Clifford Geertz wrote that "thinking consists not of (happen¬
ings in the head' (though happenings there and elsewhere are necessary for it
to occur) but of a traffic in what have been called ... significant symbols-
words for the most part.” 25

As with so many ideas in social science, the centrality of language is taken
to extremes in deconstructionism, postmodernism, and other relativist doc¬
trines. The writings of oracles like Jacques Derrida are studded with such
aphorisms as "No escape from language is possible," "Text is self-referential:'
"Language is power," and "There is nothing outside the text." Similarly, J. Hillis
Miller wrote that "language is not an instrument or tool in man's hands, a sub¬
missive means of thinking. Language rather thinks man and his ( world' ... if
he will allow it to do SO."26 The prize for the most extreme statement must go
to Roland Barthes, who declared, "Man does not exist prior to language, either
as a species or as an individual."?

The ancestry of these ideas is said to be from linguistics, though most lin¬
guists believe that deconstructionists have gone off the deep end. The original
observation was that many words are defined in part by their relationship to
other words. For example, heis defined by its contrast with I, you, they, and she,
and makes sense only as the opposite of little. And if you look up words in
a dictionary, they are defined by other words, which are defined by still other
words, until the circle is completed when you get back to a definition contain¬
ing the original word. Therefore, say the deconstructionists, language is a self-
contained system in which words have no necessary connection to reality. And
since language is an arbitrary instrument, not a medium for communicating
thoughts or describing reality, the powerful can use it to manipulate and op¬
press others. This leads in turn to an agitation for linguistic reforms: neolo¬
gisms like co or «<7that would serve as gender-neutral pronouns, a succession
of new terms for racial minorities, and a rejection of standards of clarity in
criticism and scholarship (for iflanguage is no longer a window onto thought
but the very stuff of thought, the metaphor of "clarity" no longer applies).

Like all conspiracy theories, the idea that language is a prisonhouse deni¬
grates its subject by overestimating its power. Language is the magnificent fac¬
ulty that we use to get thoughts from one head to another, and we can co-opt
it in many ways to help our thoughts along. But it is not the same as thought,
not the only thing that separates humans from other animals, not the basis of
all culture, and not an inescapable prisonhouse, an obligatory agreement, the
limits of our world, or the determiner of what is imaginable."

We have seen that perception and categorization provide us with concepts
that keep us in touch with the world. Language extends that lifeline by con¬
necting the concepts to words. Children hear noises coming out of a family
member's mouth, use their intuitive psychology and their grasp of the context

208 / Know Thyself

to infer what the speaker is trying to say, and mentally link the words to the
concepts and the grammatical rules to the relationships among them. Bowser
upends a chair, Sister yells, "The dog knocked over the chair!" and Junior de¬
duces that dog means dog, chairmeans chair, and the subject of the verb knock
overis the agent doing the knocking over." Now Junior can talk about other
dogs, other chairs, and other knockings over. There is nothing self-referential
or imprisoning about it. As the novelist Walker Percy quipped, a deconstruc¬
tionist is an academic who claims that texts have no referents and then leaves
a message on his wife's answering machine asking her to order a pepperoni
pizza for dinner.

Language surely does affect our thoughts, rather than just labeling them
for the sake oflabeling them. Most obviously, language is the conduit through
which people share their thoughts and intentions and thereby acquire the
knowledge, customs, and values of those around them. In the song "Christ¬
mas” from their rock opera. The Who described the plight of a boy without
language: "Tommy doesn’tknow what day it is; he doesn't know who Jesus was
or what prayin' is."

Language can allow us to share thoughts not just directly, by its literal con¬
tent, but also indirectly, via metaphors and metonyms that nudge listeners into
grasping connections they may not have noticed before. For example, many ex¬
pressions treat time as if it were a valuable resource, such as waste time, spend
time, valuable time, and time ismoneyr? Presumably on the first occasion a per¬
son used one of these expressions, her audience wondered why she was using a
word for money to refer to time; after all, you can't literally spend time the way
you spend pieces of gold. Then, by assuming that the speaker was not gibber¬
ing, they figured out the ways in which time indeed has something in common
with money, and assumed that that was what the speaker intended to convey.
Note that even in this clear example of language affecting thought, language is
not the same thing as thought. The original coiner of the metaphor had to see
the analogy without the benefit of the English expressions, and the first listen¬
ers had to make sense of it using a chain of ineffable thoughts about the typi¬
cal intentions of speakers and the properties shared by time and money.

Aside from its use as a medium of communication, language can be
pressed into service as one of the media used by the brain for storing and ma¬
nipulating information." The leading theory of human working memory,
from the psychologist Alan Baddeley, captures the idea nicely.32 The mind
makes use of a "phonological loop": a silent articulation of words or numbers
that persists for a few seconds and can be sensed by the mind's ear. The loop
acts as a "slave system” at the service of a "central executive:' By describing
things to ourselves using snatches oflanguage, we can temporarily store the re¬
sult of a mental computation or retrieve chunks of data stored as verbal ex¬
pressions. Mental arithmetic involving large numbers, for example, may be

In Touch with Reality / 209

carried out by retrieving verbal formulas such as "Seven times eight is fifty-
six. "33 But as the technical terms of the theory make clear, language is serving
as a slave of an executive, not as the medium of all thought.

Why do virtually all cognitive scientists and linguists believe that language
is not a prisonhouse of thoughti'" First, many experiments have plumbed the
minds of creatures without language, such as infants and nonhuman pri¬
mates, and have found the fundamental categories of thought working away:
objects, space, cause and effect, number, probability, agency (the initiation of
behavior by a person or animal), and the functions of tools."

Second, our vast storehouse of knowledge is certainly not couched in the
words and sentences in which we learned the individual facts. What did you
read in the page before this one? I would like to think that you can give a rea¬
sonably accurate answer to the question. Now try to write down the exact
words you read in those pages. Chances are you cannot recall a single sentence
verbatim, probably not even a single phrase. What you remembered is the gist
of those passages-their content, meaning, or sense-not the language itself.
Many experiments on human memory have confirmed that what we remem¬
ber over the long term is the content, not the wording, of stories and conver¬
sations. Cognitive scientists model this «semantic memory" as a web of logical
propositions, images, motor programs, strings of sounds, and other data
structures connected to one another in the brain."

A third way to put language in its place is to think about how we use it.
Writing and speaking do not consist of transcribing an interior monologue
onto paper or playing it into a microphone. Rather, we engage in a constant
give-and-take between the thoughts we try to convey and the means our lan¬
guage offers to convey them. We often grope for words, are dissatisfied with
what we write because it does not express what we wanted to say, or discover
when every combination of words seems wrong that we do not really know
what we want to say. And when we get frustrated by a mismatch between our
language and our thoughts, we don't give up, defeated and mum, but change
the language. We concoct neologisms (quark, me me, clone, deep structure), in¬
vent slang (to spam, todiss, to flame, to surf the web, a spin doctor), borrow use¬
ful words from other languages (joie devivre, schlemiel, angst, machismo), or
coin new metaphors (waste time, vote with your feet, push the outside of the en¬
velope). That is why every language, far from being an immutable penitentiary,
is constantly under renovation. Despite the lamentations of language lovers
and the coercion of tongue troopers, languages change unstoppably as people
need to talk about new things or convey new attitudes."

Finally, language itself could not function if it did not sit atop avast infra¬
structure of tacit knowledge about the world and about the intentions of other
people. When we understand language, we have to listen between the lines to
winnow out the unintended readings of an ambiguous sentence, piece to-

210 / Know Thyself

gether fractured utterances, glide over slips of the tongue, and fill in the count¬
less unsaid steps in a complete train of thought. When the shampoo bottle says
"Lather, rinse, repeat;' we don't spend the rest of our lives in the shower; we
infer that it means "repeat once." And we know how to interpret ambiguous
headlines such as "Kids Make Nutritious Snacks,""Prostitutes Appeal to Pope,"
and "British Left Waffles on Falkland Islands;' because we effortlessly apply
our background knowledge about the kinds of things that people are likely to
convey in newspapers. Indeed, the very existence of ambiguous sentences, in
which one string of words expresses two thoughts, proves that thoughts are
not the same thing as strings of words.

LANGUAGE OFTEN MAKES the news precisely because it can part company
with thoughts and attitudes. 'In 1998 Bill Clinton exploited the expectations
behind ordinary comprehension to mislead prosecutors about his affair with
Monica Lewinsky. He used words like alone, sex, and is in senses that were
technically defensible but which deviated from charitable guesses about what
people ordinarily mean by these terms. For example, he suggested he was not
"alone" with Lewinsky, even though they were the only two people in the
room, because other people were in the Oval Office complex at the time. He
said that he did not have "sex" with her, because they did not engage in inter¬
course. His words, like all words, are certainly vague at their boundaries. Ex¬
actly how far away or hidden must the nearest person be before one is
considered alone? At what point in the continuum of bodily contact-from an
accidental brush in an elevator to tantric bliss-do we say that sex has oc¬
curred? Ordinarily we resolve the vagueness by guessing how our conversa¬
tional partner would interpret words in the context, and we choose our words
accordingly. Clinton's ingenuity in manipulating these guesses, and the out¬
rage that erupted when he was forced to explain what he had done, show that
people have an acute understanding of the difference between words and the
thoughts they are designed to convey.

Language conveys not just literal meanings but also a speaker's attitude.
Think of the difference between/at and voluptuous, slender and scrawny, thrifty
and stingy, articulate and slick Racial epithets, which are laced with contempt,
are justifiably off-limits among responsible people, because using them con¬
veys the tacit message that contempt for the people referred to by the epithet is
acceptable. But the drive to adopt new terms for disadvantaged groups goes
much further than this basic sign of respect; it often assumes that words and
attitudes are so inseparable that one can reengineer people's attitudes by tin¬
kering with the words. In 1994 the Los Angeles Times adopted a style sheet
that banned some 150 words, including birth defect, Canuck, Chinese fire drill,
dark continent, divorcee, Dutch treat, handicapped, illegitimate, invalid, man¬
made, New World, stepchild, and to welsh. The editors assumed that words

In Touch with Reality / 211

register in the brain with their literal meanings, so that an invalid is under¬
stood as "someone who is not valid" and Dutch treat is understood as a slur on
contemporary Netherlanders. (In fact, it is one of many idioms in which Dutch
means "ersatz," such as Dutch oven, Dutch door, Dutch uncle, Dutch courage,
and Dutch auction, the remnants of a long-forgotten rivalry between the En¬
glish and the Dutch.)

But even the more reasonable attempts at linguistic reform are based on a
dubious theory of linguistic determinism. Many people are puzzled by the re¬
placement of formerly unexceptionable terms by new ones: Negro by blackby
African American, Spanish-American by Hispanic by Latino, crippled by handi¬
capped by disabled by challenged, slum by ghetto by inner city by (according to
the Times) slum once again. Occasionally the neologisms are defended with
some rationale about their meaning. In the 1960s, the word Negro was re¬
placed by the word black, because the parallel between the words black and
white was meant to underscore the equality of the races. Similarly, Native
American reminds us of who was here first and avoids the geographically inac¬
curate term Indian. But often the new terms replace ones that were perfectly
congenial in their day, as we see in names for old institutions that are obviously
sympathetic to the people being named: the United Negro College Fund, the
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Shriners
Hospitals for Crippled Children. And sometimes a term can be tainted or
unfashionable while a minor variant is fine: consider colored people versus
people of color, Afro-American versus African American, Negro-Spanish for
"black"-versus black. If anything, a respect for literal meaning should send us
off looking for a new word for the descendants of Europeans, who are neither
white nor Caucasian. Something else must be driving the replacement process.

Linguists are familiar with the phenomenon, which may be called the eu¬
phemism treadmill. People invent new words for emotionally charged referents,
but soon the euphemism becomes tainted by association, and a new word must
be found, which soon acquires its own connotations, and so on. Water closet
becomes toilet (originally a term for any kind of body care, as in toilet kit and
toilet water), which becomes bathroom, which becomes restroom, which be¬
comes lavatory. Undertaker changes to mortician, which changes to funeral di¬
rector. Garbage collection turns into sanitation, which turns into environmental
services. Gym (from gymnasium, originally "high school") becomes physical
education, which becomes (at Berkeley) human biodynamics. Even the word
minority-the most neutral label conceivable, referring only to relative
numbers-was banned in 2001 by the San Diego City Council (and nearly
banned by the Boston City Council) because it was deemed disparaging to non¬
whites. "No matter how you slice it, minority means less than," said a semanti¬
cally challenged official at Boston College, where the preferred term is AHANA
(an acronym for African-American, Hispanic, Asian, and Native American I."

212/Know Thyself

■ The euphemism treadmill shows that concepts, not words, are primary in
people's minds. Give a concept a new name, and the name becomes colored by
the concept; the concept does not become freshened by the name, at least not
for long. Names for minorities will continue to change as long as people have
negative attitudes toward them. We will know that we have achieved mutual
respect when the names stay put.

"IMAGE IS NOTHING. Thirst is everything;' screams a soft-drink ad that tries
to create a new image for its product by making fun of soft-drink ads that try
to create images for their products. Like words, images are salient tokens of
our mental lives. And like words, images are said to have an insidious power
over our consciousness, presumably because they are inscribed directly onto a
blank slate. In postmodernist and relativist thinking, images are held to shape
our view of reality, or to be our view of reality, or to be reality itself. This is es¬
pecially true of images representing celebrities, politicians, women, and
AHANAs. And as with language, the scientific study of imagery shows that the
fear is misplaced.

A good description of the standard view of images within cultural studies
and related disciplines may be found in the Concise Glossary of Cultural The¬
ory. It defines image as a "mental or visual representation of an object or event
as depicted in the mind, a painting, a photograph, or film." Having thus run
together images in the world (such as paintings) with images in the mind, the
entry lays out the centrality of images in postmodernism, cultural studies, and
academic feminism.

First it notes, reasonably enough, that images can misrepresent reality and
thereby serve the interests of an ideology. A racist caricature, presumably, is a
prime example. But then it takes the concept further:

With what is called the "crisis of representation" brought about by ...
postmodernism, however, it is often questioned whether an image can
be thought to simply represent, or misrepresent, a supposedly prior or
external, image-free reality. Reality is seen rather as always subject to, or
as the product of, modes of representation. In this view we inescapably
inhabit a world of images or representations and not a "real world" and
true or false images of it.

In other words, if a tree falls in a forest and there is no artist to paint it, not only
did the tree make no sound, but it did not fall, and there was no tree there to
begin with.

In a further move ... we are thought to exist in a world of HYPERREAL¬
ITY, in which images are self-generating and entirely detached from any

In Touch with Reality/ 213

supposed reality. This accords with a common view of contemporary
entertainment and politics as being all a matter of "image;' or appear¬
ance, rather than of substantial content.

Actually,the doctrine ofhyperreality contradicts the common view of contem¬
porary politics and entertainment as being a matter of image and appearance.
The whole point of the common view is that there is a reality separate from
images, and that is what allows us to decry the images that are misleading. We
can, for example, criticize an old movie that shows slaves leading happy lives,
or an ad that shows a corrupt politician pretending to defend the environ¬
ment. If there were no such thing as substantial content, we would have no
basis for preferring an accurate documentary about slavery to an apologia for
it, or preferring a good expose of a politician to a slick campaign ad.

The entry notes that images are associated with the world of publicity, ad¬
vertising, and fashion, and thereby with business and profits. An image may
thus be tied to "an imposed stereotype or an alternative subjective or cultural
identity." Media images become mental images: people cannot help but think
that women or politicians or African Americans conform to the depictions in
movies and advertisements. And this elevates cultural studies and postmod¬
ernist art into forces for personal and political liberation:

The study of "images of women" or "women's images" sees this field as
one in which stereotypes of women can be reinforced, parodied, or ac¬
tively contested through critical analysis, alternative histories, or cre¬
ative work in writing and the media committed to the production of
positive counter- images .39

I have not hidden my view that this entire line of thinking is a conceptual
mess. If we want to understand how politicians or advertisers manipulate us,
the last thing we should do is blur distinctions among things in the world, our
perception of those things when they are in front of our eyes, the mental im¬
ages of those things that we construct from memory, and physical images such
as photographs and drawings.

As we saw at the beginning of this chapter, the visual brain is an im¬
mensely complicated system that was designed by the forces of evolution to
give us an accurate reading of the consequential things in front of us. The "in¬
telligent eye;' as perceptual psychologists call it, does not just compute the
shapes and motions of people before us. It also guesses their thoughts and in¬
tentions by noticing how they gaze at, approach, avoid, help, or hinder other
objects and people. And these guesses are then measured against everything
else we know about people-what we infer from gossip, from a person's
words and deeds, and from Sherlock Holmes-style deductions. The result is

214/ Know Thyself

the knowledge base or semantic memory that also underlies our use of lan¬
guage.

Physical images such as photographs and paintings are devices that reflect
light in patterns similar to those coming off real objects, thereby making the
visual system respond as if it were really seeing those objects. Though people
have long dreamed of illusions that completely fool the brain-Descartes's evil
demon, the philosopher's thought experiment in which a person does not re¬
alize he is a brain in a vat, the science-fiction writer's prophecy of perfect vir¬
tual reality like in The Matrix-in actuality the illusions foisted upon us by
physical images are never more than partially effective. Our perceptual sys¬
tems pick up on the imperfections of an image-the brush strokes, pixels, or
frame-and our conceptual systems pick up on the fact that we are entertain¬
ing a hypothetical world that is separate from the real world. It's not that peo¬
ple invariably distinguish fiction from reality: they can lose themselves in
fiction, or misremember something they read in a novel as something they
read in the newspapers or that happened to a friend, or mistakenly believe that
a stylized portrayal of a time and place is an accurate portrayal. But all of us are
capable of distinguishing fictitious worlds from real ones, as we see when a
two-year-old pretends that a banana is a telephone for the fun of it but at the
same time understands that a banana is not literally a telephone." Cognitive
scientists believe that the ability to entertain propositions without necessarily
believing them-to distinguish "John believes there is a Santa Claus" from
"There is a Santa Claus"-is a fundamental ability of human cognition."
Many believe that a breakdown of this ability underlies the thought disorder
in the syndrome called schizophrenia."

Finally, there are mental images, the visualizations of objects and scenes in
the mind's eye. The psychologist Stephen Kosslynhas shown that the brain is
equipped with a system capable of reactivating and manipulating memories of
perceptual experience, a bit like Photoshop with its tools for assembling, rotat¬
ing, and coloring images." Like language, imagery may be used as a slave sys-
tem-a "visuospatial sketchpad"-by the central executive of the brain,
making it a valuable form of mental representation. We use mental imagery, for
example, when we visualize how a chair might fit in a living room or whether
a sweater would look good on a relative. Imagery is also an invaluable tool to
novelists, who imagine scenes before describing them in words, and to scien¬
tists, who rotate molecules or play out forces and motions in their imagination.

Though mental images allow our experiences (including our experience
of media images) to affect our thoughts and attitudes long after the original
objects have gone, it is a mistake to think that raw images are downloaded into
our minds and then constitute our mental lives. Images are not stored in the
mind like snapshots in a shoebox; if they were, how could you ever find the
one you want? Rather, they are labeled and linked to a vast database of

In Touch with Reality / 215

knowledge, which allows them to be evaluated and interpreted in terms of
what they stand for.^ Chess masters, for example, are famous for their ability
to remember games in progress, but their mental images of the board are not
raw photographs. Rather, they are saturated with abstract information about
the game, such as which piece is threatening which other one and which clus¬
ters of pieces form viable defenses. We know this because when a chessboard is
sprinkled with pieces at random, chess masters are no better at remembering
the arrangement than amateurs are." When images represent real people, not
just chessmen, there are even more possibilities for organizing and annotating
them with information about people's goals and motives-for example,
whether the person in an image is sincere or just acting.

The reason that images cannot constitute the contents of our thoughts is
that images, like words, are inherently ambiguous. An image of Lassie could
stand for Lassie, collies, dogs, animals, television stars, or family values. Some
other, more abstract form of information must pick out the concept that an
image is taken to exemplify. Or consider the sentence Yesterday my unclefired
his lawyer (an example suggested by Dan Dennett). When understanding the
sentence. Brad might visualize his own ordeals of the day before and glimpse
the "uncle" slot in a family tree, then picture courthouse steps and an angry
man. Irene might have no image for "yesterday" but might visualize her uncle
Bob's face, a slamming door, and a power-suited woman. Yetdespite these very
different image sequences, both people have understood the sentence in the
same way, as we could see by questioning them or asking them to paraphrase
the sentence. "Imagery couldn'tbc the key to comprehension;' Dennett points
out, "because you can't draw a picture of an uncle, or of yesterday, or firing, or
a lawyer. Uncles, unlike clowns and firemen, don't look different in any char¬
acteristic way that can he visually represented, and yesterdays don't look like
anything at all."46

Since images are interpreted in the context of a deeper understanding of
people and their relationships, the «crisisof representation;' with its paranoia
about the manipulation of our mind by media images, is overblown. People
are not helplessly programmed with images; they can evaluate and interpret
what they see using everything else they know, such as the credibility and mo¬
tives of the source.

The postmodernist equating of images with thoughts has not only made a
hash of several scholarly disciplines but has laid waste to the world of contem¬
porary art. If images are the disease, the reasoning goes, then art is the cure.
Artists can neutralize the power of media images by distorting them or repro¬
ducing them in odd contexts (like the ad parodies in Mad magazine or on Sat-
urdayNight Live, only not funny). Anyone familiar with contemporary art has
seen the countless works in which stereotypes of women, minorities, or gay

216/ Know Thyself

people are "reinforced, parodied, or actively contested." A prototypical exam¬
ple is a 1994 exhibit at the Whitney Museum in New York called "Black Male:
Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary Art.” It aimed to take apart
the way that African American men are culturally constructed in demonizing
and marginalizing visual stereotypes such as the sex symbol, the athlete, the
Sambo, and the photograph in a Wanted poster. According to the catalogue
essay, "The real struggle is over the power to control images." The art critic
Adam Gopnik (whose mother and sister are cognitive scientists) called atten¬
tion to the simplistic theory of cognition behind this tedious formula:

The show is intended to be socially therapeutic: its aim is to make you
face the socially constructed images of black men, so that by confronting
them-or, rather, seeing artists confront them on your behalf-you can
make them go away. The trouble is that the 'entire enterprise of "disas¬
sembling social images" rests on an ambiguity in the way we use the
word "image." Mental images are not really images at all, but instead
consist of complicated opinions, positions, doubts, and passionately
held convictions, rooted in experience and amendable by argument, by
more experience, or by coercion. Our mental images of black men,
white judges, the press, and so on do not take the form of pictures of the
kind that you can hang up (or "deconstruct") on a museum wall. ...
Hitler did not hate Jewsbecause there were pictures of swarthy Semites
with big noses imprinted on his cerebellum; racism does not exist in
America because the picture of O. J. Simpson on the cover of Time is too
dark. The view that visual cliches shape beliefs is both too pessimistic, in
that it supposes that people are helplessly imprisoned by received
stereotypes, and too optimistic, in that it supposes that if you could
change the images you could change the beliefs^

Recognizing that we are equipped with sophisticated faculties that keep us
in touch with reality does not entail ignoring the ways in which our faculties
can be turned against us. People lie, sometimes baldly, sometimes through in¬
sinuation and presupposition (as in the question "When did you stop beating
your wife?"). People disseminate disinformation about ethnic groups, not just
pejorative stereotypes but tales of exploitation and perfidy that serve to stoke
moralistic outrage against them. People try to manipulate social realities like
status (which exist in the mind of the beholder) to make themselves look good
or to sell products.

But we can best protect ourselves against such manipulation by pinpoint¬
ing the vulnerabilities of our faculties of categorization, language, and im¬
agery, not by denying their complexity. The view that humans are passive

In Touch with Reality / 217

receptacles of stereotypes) words) and images is condescending to ordinary
people and gives unearned importance to the pretensions of cultural and aca¬
demic elites. And exotic pronouncements about the limitations of our facul¬
ties) such as that there is nothing outside the text or that we inhabit a world of
images rather than a real world) make it impossible even to identify lies and
misrepresentations) let alone to understand how they are promulgated.

218 / Know Thyself

Chapter 13

Out of OUf Depths

A man has got to know his limitations.

-Clint Eastwood in Magnum Force

most people are familiar with the idea that some of our ordeals come from
a mismatch between the source of our passions in evolutionary history and
the goals we set for ourselves today. People gorge themselves in anticipation of
a famine that never comes, engage in dangerous liaisons that conceive babies
they don't want, ancT rev up their bodie in response to stressors from which
they cannot run away.

What is true for the emotions may also be true for the intellect. Some of
our perplexities may come from a mismatch between the purposes for which
our cognitive faculties evolved and the purposes to which we put them today.
This is obvious enough when it comes to raw data processing. People do not
try to multiply six-digit numbers in their heads or remember the phone num¬
ber of everyone they meet, because they know their minds were not designed
for the job. But it is not as obvious when it comes to the way we conceptualize
the world. Our minds keep us in touch with aspects ofreality-such as objects,
animals, and people-that our ancestors dealt with for millions of years. But
as science and technology open up new and hidden worlds, our untutored in¬
tuitions may find themselves at sea.

What are these intuitions? Many cognitive scientists believe that human
reasoning is not accomplished by a single, general-purpose computer in the
head. The world is a heterogeneous place, and we are equipped with different
kinds of intuitions and logics, each appropriate to one department of reality.
These ways of knowing have been called systems, modules, stances, faculties,
mental organs, multiple intelligences, and reasoning engines.' They emerge
early in life, are present in every normal person, and appear to be computed in
partly distinct sets of networks in the brain. They may be installed by different

Out of OUf Depths / 219

combinations ofgenes, or they may emerge when brain tissue self-organizes in
response to different problems to be solved and different patterns in the sen¬
sory input. Most likely they develop by some combination of these forces.

What makes our reasoning faculties different from the departments in a
university is that they are not just broad areas of knowledge, analyzed with
whatever tools work best. Each faculty is based on a core intuition that was
suitable for analyzing the world in which we evolved. Though cognitive scien¬
tists have not agreed on a Gray's Anatomy of the mind, here is a tentative but
defensible list of cognitive faculties and the core intuitions on which they are
based:

• An intuitive physics, which we use to keep track of how objects fall,
bounce, and bend. Its core intuition is the concept ofthe object, which oc¬
cupies one place, exists for a continuous span of time, and follows laws of
motion and force. These are not Newton's laws but something closer to
the medieval conception of impetus, an "oomph" that keeps an object in
motion and gradually dissipates.'

• An intuitive version of biology or natural history, which we use to under¬
stand the living world. Its core intuition is that living things house a hid-
deriessence that gives them their form and powers and drives their growth
and bodily functions.'

• An intuitive engineering, which we use to make and understand tools and
other artifacts. Its core intuition is that atool is an objectwith apurpose-
an object designed by a person to achieve a goal. 4

• An intuitive psychology, which we use to understand other people. Its core
intuition is that other people are not objects or machines but are ani¬
mated by the invisible entity we call the mind or the soul. Minds contain
beliefs and desires and are the immediate cause of behavior.

• A spatial sense, which we use to navigate the world and keep track of
where things are. It is based on a dead reckoner, which updates coordi¬
nates of the body's location as it moves and turns, and a network of men¬
tal maps. Each map is organized by a different reference frame: the eyes,
the head, the body, or salient objects and places in the world.'

• A number sense, which we use to think about quantities and amounts. It
is based on an ability to register exact quantities for small numbers of ob¬
jects (one, two, and three) and to make rough relative estimates for larger
numbers."

• A sense of probability, which we use to reason about the likelihood of un¬
certain events. It is based on the ability to track the relative frequencies of
events, that is, the proportion of events of some kind that turn out one
way or the other.'

220/ Know Thyself

• An intuitive economies, which we use to exchange goods and favors. It is
based on the concept of reciprocal exchange, in which one party confers a
benefit on another and is entitled to an equivalent benefit in return.

• A mental database and logics which we use to represent ideas and to infer
new ideas from old ones. It is based on assertions about what's what,
what's where, or who did what to whom, when, where, and why. The as¬
sertions are linked in a mind-wide web and can be recombined with logi¬
cal and causal operators such as and, or, not, all, some, necessary,
possible, and cause. s

• Language which we use to share the ideas from our mental logic. It is
based on a mental dictionary of memorized words and a mental grammar
of combinatorial rules. The rules organize vowels and consonants into
words, words into bigger words and phrases, and phrases into sentences,
in such a way that the meaning of the combination can be computed from
the meanings of the parts and the way they are arranged. "

The mind also has components for which it is hard to tell where cognition
leaves off and emotion begins. These include a system for asse in danger,
coupled with the emotion called fear, a system for assessing contamination,
coupled with the emotion called disgust, and asm se*which is complex

enough to deserve a chapter of its own.

These ways of knowing and core intuitions are suitable for the lifestyle of
small groups of illiterate, stateless people who live off the land, survive by their
wits, and depend on what they can carry. Our ancestors left this lifestyle for a
settled existence only a few millennia ago, too recently for evolution to have
done much, if anything, to our brains. Conspicuous by their absence are fac¬
ulties suited to the stunning new understanding of the world wrought by sci¬
ence and technology. For many domains of knowledge, the mind could not
have evolved dedicated machinery, the brain and genome show no hints of
specialization, and people show no spontaneous intuitive understanding ei¬
ther in the crib or afterward. They include modern physics, cosmology, ge¬
netics, evolution, neuroscience, embryology, economics, and mathematics.

It's not just that we have to go to school or read books to learn these sub¬
jects. It’s that we have no mental tools to grasp them intuitively. We depend on
analogies that press an old mental faculty into service, or on jerry-built men¬
tal contraptions that wire together bits and pieces of other faculties. Under¬
standing in these domains is likely to be uneven, shallow, and contaminated by
primitive intuitions. And that can shape debates in the border disputes in
which science and technology make contact with everyday life. The point of
this chapter is that together with all the moral, empirical, and political factors
that go into these debates, we should add the cognitive factors: the way our

Out ofOUf Depths / 221

minds naturally frame issues. Our own cognitive makeup is a missing piece of
many puzzles, including education, bioethics, food safety, economics, and
human understanding itself.

THE MOST obvious arena in which we confront native ways of thinking is
the schoolhouse. Any theory of education must be based on a theory of
human nature, and in the twentieth century that theory was often the Blank
Slate or the Noble Savage.

Traditional education is based in large part on the Blank Slate: children
come to school empty and have knowledge deposited in them, to be repro¬
duced later on tests. (Critics of traditional education call this the "savings and
loan" model.) The Blank Slate also underlies the common philosophy that the
a y school-age years are an opportunity zone in which social values are
shaped for life<f^Vlany schools today use the early grades to instill desirable at¬
titudes toward-the environment, gender, sexuality, and ethnic diversity.

Progressive educational practice, for its part, is based on the Noble Savage.
As A. S. Neill wrote in his influential book Summer hill, "A child is innately wise
and realistic. If left to himselfwithout adult suggestion ofany kind, he will de¬
velop as far as he is capable ofdeveloping."?Neill and other progressive theo¬
rists of the 1960s and 1970s argued that schools should do away with
examinations, grades, curricula, and even books. Though few schools went
that far, the movement left a mark on educational practice. In the method of
reading instruction known as IVhole Language, children are not taught which
letter goes with which sound but are immersed in a book-rich environment
where reading skills are expected to blossom spontaneously, n In the philoso¬
phy of mathematics instruction known as constructivism, children are not
drilled with arithmetic tables but are enjoined to rediscover mathematical
truths themselves by solving problems in groups.'! Both methods fare badly
\yhen students' learning is assessed objectively, but advocates of the methods
tend to disdain standardized testing.

An understanding of the mind as a complex system shaped by evolution
runs against these philosophies. The alternative has emerged from the work of
cognitive scientists such as Susan Carey, Howard Gardner, and David Geary.'?
Education is neither writing on a blank slate nor allowing the child's nobility
to come into flower. Rather, education is a technology that tries to make up for
what the human flfrind i innately bad a . Children don't have to go to school
to learn to walk, talk, recognize objects, or remember the personalities of their
friends, even though these tasks are much harder than reading, adding, or re¬
membering dates in history. They do have to go to school to learn written lan¬
guage, arithmetic, and science, because those bodies of knowledge and skill
were invented too recently for any species-wide knack for them to have
evolved.

222 / Know Thyself

Far from being empty receptacles or universal learners, then, children are
equipped with a toolbox of implements for reasoning and learning in particu¬
lar ways, and those implements must be cleverly recruited to master problems
for which they were not designed. That requires not just inserting new facts
and skills in children's minds but debugging and disabling old ones. Students
cannot learn Newtonian physics until they unlearn their intuitive impetus-
based physics." They cannot learn modern biology until they unlearn their
intuitive biology, which thinks in terms of vital essences. And they cannot
learn evolution until they unlearn their intuitive engineering, which attributes
design to the intentions of a designer."

Schooling also requires pupils to expose and reinforce skills that are ordi¬
narily buried in unconscious black boxes. When children learn to read, the
vowels and consonants that are seamlessly woven together in speech must be
forced into children's awareness before they can associate them with squiggles
on a page." Effective education may also require co-opting old faculties to
deal with new demands. Snatches oflanguage can be pressed into service to do
calculation, as when we recall the stanza "Five times five is twenty-five." ?The
logic of grammar can be used to grasp large numbers: the expression four
thousand three hundred andfifty-seven has the grammatical structure of an En¬
glish noun phrase like hat coat, and mittens. When a student parses the num¬
ber phrase she can call to mind the mental operation of aggregation, which is
related to the mathematical operation of addition." Spatial cognition is
drafted into understanding mathematical relationships through the use of
graphs, which turn data or equations into shapes.'? Intuitive engineering sup¬
ports the learning of anatomy and physiology (organs are understood as gad¬
gets with functions), and intuitive physics supports the learning.of chemistry
and biology (stuff, including living stuff, is made out of tiny, bouncy, sticky
objects)."

Geary points out a final implication. Because much of the content of edu¬
cation is not cognitively natural, the process of mastering it may not always be
easy and pleasant, notwithstanding the mantra that learning is fun. Children
may be innately motivated to make friends, acquire status, hone motor skills,
and explore the physical world, buteheyarenot necessarily motivated to adapt
their cognitive faculties to unnatural, tasks like formal mathematic . A family,
peer group, and culture that ascribe high status to school achievement may be
needed to give a child the motive to persevere toward effortful feats oflearning
whose rewards are apparent only over the long term."

the laypersons intuitive psychology or “theory of mind" is one ofthe
brain's most striking abilities. We do not treat other people as wind-up dolls
but think of them as being animated by minds: nonphysical entities we can¬
not see or touch but that are as real to us as bodies and objects. Aside from

Out of Our Depths / 223

allowing us to predict people's behavior from their beliefs and desires, our
theory of mind is tied to our ability to empathize and to our conception oflife
and death. The difference between a dead body and a living one is that a dead
body no longer contains the vital force we call a mind. Our theory of mind is
.the source of the concept of the soul. The ghost in the machine is deeply
rooted in our way of thinking about people.

A belief in the soul, in turn, meshes with our moral convictions. The core
of morality is the recognition that others have interests as we do-that they
"feel want, taste grief, need friendsas Shakespeare put it— anti therefore that
they have a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of their interests. But who are
those "others"? We need a boundary that allows us to be callous to rocks and
plants but forces us to treat other humans as "persons" that possess inalienable
rights. Otherwise, it seems, we would place ourselves on a slippery slope that
ends in the disposal of inconvenient people or in grotesque deliberations on
the value of individual lives. As Pope John Paul II pointed out, the notion that
every human carries infinite value by virtue of possessing a soul would seem
to give us that boundary.

Until recently the intuitive concept of the soul served us pretty well. Liv¬
ing people had souls, which come into existence at the moment of conception
and leave their bodies when they die. Animals, plants, and inanimate objects
do not have souls at all. But science is showing that what we call the soul-the
locus of sentience, reason, and will--consists of the information-processing
activity of the brain, an organ governed by the laws of biology. In an individ¬
ual person it comes into existence gradually through the differentiation of tis¬
sues growing from a single cell. In the species it came into existence gradually
as the forces of evolution modified the brains of simpler animals. And though
our concept of souls used to fit pretty well with natural phenomena-a
woman was either pregnant or not, a person was either dead or alive-bio-
medical research is now presenting us with cases where the two are out of reg¬
ister. These cases are not just scientific curiosities but are intertwined with
pressing issues such as contraception, abortion, infanticide, animal rights,
cloning, euthanasia, and research involving human embryos, especially the
harvesting of stem cells.

In the face of these difficult choices it is tempting to look to biolo to find
r ratify boundarie such as "when li e begin." ut that only highlights the
clash between two incommensurable ways of conceiving life and mind, he
in ui iv and morall u ful concept o an immaterial pirit imply cannot b
reconciled wih h 'in ific concept a ai ac ivit emer in r 11 in
n a en and ph I .a matter where we try to draw the line between life
and nonlife, or between mind and nonmind, ambiguous cases pop up to chal¬
lenge our moral intuitions.

The closest event we can find to a thunderclap marking the entry of a soul

224 / Know Thyself

into the world is the moment nf conception. At that instant a new human
genome is determined, and we have an entity destined to develop into a
unique individual. The Catholic Church and certain other Christian denomi¬
nations designate conception as the moment of ensoulment and the begin¬
ning of life (which, of course, makes abortion a form of murder). But just as a
microscope reveals that a straightedge is really ragged, research on human re¬
production shows that tfie "moment of conception" is not a moment at all.
Sometimes several sperm penetrate the outer membrane of the egg, and it
takes time for the egg to eject the extra chromosomes. What and where is the
soul during this interval? Even when a single sperm enters, its genes remain
separate from those of the egg for a day or more, and it takes yet another day
or so for the newly merged genome to control the cell. So the "moment" of
conception is in fact a span of twenty-four to forty-eight hours.P Nor is the
conceptus destined to become a baby. Between two-thirds and three-quarters
of them never implant in the uterus and are spontaneously aborted, some be¬
cause they are genetically defective, others for no discernible reason.

Still, one might say that at whatever point during this interlude the new
genome is formed, the specification of a unique new person has come into ex¬
istence. The soul, by this reasoning, may be identified with the genome. But
during the next few days, as the embryo's cells begin to divide, they can split
into several embryos, which develop into identical twins, triplets, and so on. Do
identical twins share a sottl? Did the Dionne quintuplets make do with one-
fifth of a soul each? If not, where did the four extra souls come from? Indeed,
every cell in the growing embryo is capable, with the right manipulations, of
becoming a new embryo that can grow into a child. Does a multicell embryo
consist of one soul per cell, and if so, where do the other souls go when the cells
lose that ability? And not only can one embryo become two people, but two
embryos can become one person. Occasionally two fertilized eggs,which ordi¬
narily would go on to become fraternal twins, merge into a single embryo that
develops into a person who is a genetic chimera: some of her cells have one
genome, others have another genome. Does her body house two souls?

For that matter, if human cloning ever became possible (and there appears
to be no technical obstacle), every cell in a person's body would have the spe¬
cial ability that is supposedly unique to a conceptus, namely developing into a
human being. True, the genes in a cheek cell can become a person only with
unnatural intervention, but that is just as true for an egg that is fertilized in
vitro. Yet no one would deny that children conceived by IVF have souls.

The idea that ensoulment takes place at conception is not only hard to
reconcile with biology but does not have the moral superiority credited to it.
It implies that we should prosecute users of intrauterine contraceptive devices
and the "morning-after pill" for murder, because they prevent the conceptus
from implanting. It implies that we should divert medical research from

Out of Our Depths / 225

curin cal c and heart di ea e to preventing the spontaneou mis carri es 0
vast number of micro copic conceptus .Jt impels us to find surrogate moth¬
ers for the large number of embryos left ver from IVF that are currently sit¬
ting in fertility clinic freezers. It would outlaw research on conception and
early embryonic development that promises to reduce infertility, birth defects,
and pediatric cancer, and research on stem cells that could lead to treatments
for Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, diabetes, and spinal-cord injuries.
And it flouts the key moral intuition that other people are worthy of moral
consideration because of their feelings-their ability to love, think, plan,
enjoy, and suffer-all of which depend on a functioning nervous system.

The enormous moral costs of equating a person with a conceptus, and the
cognitive gymnastics required to maintain that belief in the face of modern bi¬
ology, can sometimes lead to an agonizing reconsideration of deeply held be¬
liefs. In 2001, Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah broke with his longtime allies in
the anti-abortion movement and came out in favor of stem-cell research after
studying the science of reproduction and meditating on his Mormon faith, “I
have searched my conscience:’ he said. “I just cannot equate a child living in
the womb, with moving toes and fingers and a beating heart, with an embryo
in a freezer."23

The belief that bodies are invested with souls is not just a product of reli¬
gious doctrine but embedded in people's psychology and likely to emerge
whenever they have not digested the findings of biology. The public reaction
to cloning is a case in point. Some people fear that cloning would present us
with the option of becoming immortal, others that it could produce an army
of obedient zombies, or a source of organs for the original person to harvest
when needed. In the recent Arnold Schwarzenegger movie The Sixth Day,
clones are called "blanks:' and their DNA gives them only a physical form, not
a mind; they acquire a mind when a neural recording of the original person is
downloaded into them. When Dolly the sheep was cloned in 1997, the cover of
Der Spiegel showed a parade of Claudia Schiffers, Hitlers, and Einsteins, as if
being a supermodel, fascist dictator, or scientific genius could be copied along
with the DNA.

Clones, in fact, are just identical twins born at different times. If Einstein
had a twin, he would not have been a zombie, would not have continued Ein¬
stein's stream of consciousness if Einstein had predeceased him, would not
have given up his vital organs without a struggle, and probably would have
been no Einstein (since intelligence is only partly heritable). The same would
be true of a person cloned from a speck of Einstein. bizarre rni concep-
IOn o cloning an be traced to the per i tent belie that the body i uffused
i ou . One conception of cloning, which sets off a fear of an army of
zombies, blanks, or organ farms, imagines the process to be the duplication of
a body without a soul. The other, which sets off fears of a Faustian grab at im-

226/Know Thyself

mortality or of a resurrected Hitler, conceives of cloning as duplicating the
body together with the soul. This conception may also underlie the longing of
some bereaved parents for a dead child to be cloned, as if that would bring the
child back to life. In fact, the clone would not only grow up in a different world
from the one the dead sibling grew up in, but would have different brain tissue
and would traverse a different line of sentient experience.

The discovery that what we call "the person" emerges piecemeal from a
gradually developing brain forces us to reframe problems in bioethics. It
would have been convenient if biologists had discovered a point at which the
brain is fully assembled and is plugged in and turned on for the first time, but
that is not how brains work. The nervous system emerges in the embryo as a
simple tube and differentiates into a brain and spinal cord. The brain begins to
function in the fetus, but it continues to wire itself well into childhood and
even adolescence. The demand by both religious and secular ethicists that we
identify the "criteria for personhood" assumes that a dividing line in brain de¬
velopment can be found. But any claim that such a line has been sighted leads
to moral absurdities.

If we set the boundary for personhood at birth, we should be prepared to
allow an abortion minutes before birth, despite the lack of any significant dif¬
ference between a late-term fetus and a neonate. It seems more reasonable to
draw the line at viability. But viability is a continuum that depends on the state
of current biomedical tec&nology and <%> the risks of impairment that parents
are willing to tolerate in their child. And it invites the obvious rejoinder: if it is
all right to abort a twenty-four-week fetus, then why not the barely distin¬
guishable fetus of twenty-four weeks plus one day? And if that is permissible,
why not a fetus of twenty-four weeks plus two days, or three days, and so on
until birth? On the other hand, if it is impermissible to abort a fetus the day
before its birth, then what about two days before, and three days, and so on, all
the way back to conception?

We face the same problem in reverse when considering euthanasia and liv¬
ing wills at the end of life. Most people do not depart this world in a puff of
smoke but suffer a gradual and uneven breakdown of the various parts of the
brain and body. Many kinds and degrees of existence lie between the living and
the dead, and that will become even more true as medical technology im¬
proves.

We face the problem again ia grappling with demands for animal rights.
Activists who grant the right to life to any sentient being must conclude that a
hamburger eater is a party to murder and that a rodent exterminator is a per¬
petrator of mass murder. They must outlaw medical research that would sac¬
rifice a few mice but save a million children from painful deaths (since no one
would agree to drafting a few human beings for such experiments, and on this
view mice have the rights we ordinarily grant to people). On the other hand,

Out of Our Depths / 227

an opponent of animal rights who maintains that personhood comes from
being a member of Homo sapiens is just a species bigot, no more thoughtful
than the race bigots who value the lives of whites more than blacks. After all,
other mammals fight to stay alive, appear to experience pleasure, and undergo
pain, fear, and stress when their well-being is compromised. The great apes
also share our higher pleasures of curiosity and love of kin, and our deeper
aches of boredom, loneliness, and grief. Why should those interests be re¬
spected for our species but not for others?

Some moral philosophers try to thread a boundary across this treacherous
landscape by equating personhood with cognitive traits that humans happen
to possess. These include an ability to reflect upon oneself as a continuous
locus of consciousness, to form and savor plans for the future, to dread death,
and to express a choice not to die." At first glance the boundary is appealing
because it puts humans on one side and animals and conceptuses on the other.
But it also implies that nothing is wrong with killing unwanted newborns, the
senile, and the mentally handicapped, who lack the qualifying traits. Almost
no one is willing to accept a criterion with those implications.

There is no solution to these dilemmas, because they arise out of a funda¬
mental incommensurability: between our intuitive psychology,with its all-or-
none concept of a person or soul, and the brute facts of biology, which tell us
that the human brain evolved gradually, develops gradually, and can die grad¬
ually. And that means tha moral conundrums uch a abortion, euthanasia,
and animal rights will never be resolved in a deci ive and intuitively satisfying
wa . T is does not mean that no policyis defensible and that the whole matter
should be left to personal taste, political power, or religious dogma. As the
bioethicist Ronald Green has pointed out, it just m an we have o r oncep-
tualize the problem: from jilldillg aboun r in nature to chao ing a boundary
that b t trade of the conflictin ood and evil for a poli il mma. 25
We should make decisions in each case that can be practically implemented,
that maximize happiness, and that minimize current and future suffering.
Many of our current policies are already compromises of this sort: research on
animals is permitted but regulated; a late-term fetus is not awarded full legal
status as a person but may not be aborted unless it is necessary to protect the
mother's life or health, reen notes that the shift from nding boun aries to
c ing boundaries i a conceptual revolution of opernican proportions.
But the old conceptualization, which amounts to trying to pinpoint when the
ghost enters the machine, is scientifically untenable and has no business guid¬
ing policy in the twenty-first century.

The traditional argument against pragmatic, case-by-case decisions is that
they lead to slippery slopes. If we allow abortion, we will soon allow infanti¬
cide; if we permit research on stem cells, we will bring on a Brave New World
of government-engineered humans. But here, I think, the nature of human

228/Know Thyself

cognition can get us out of the dilemma rather than pushing us into one. A
slippery slope assumes that conceptual categories must have crisp boundaries
that allow in-or-out decisions, or else anything goes. But that is not how
human concepts work. As we have seen, many everyday concepts have fuzzy
boundaries, and the mind distinguishes between a fuzzy boundary and no
boundary at all." dult" and "child" are fuzzy categories, which i why we could
rai e the drinkin a e t enty-one or lower the voting age to eighteen. But
hat did n t put us on a slippery slop in vhich we eventually rai ed the drink¬
ing age to fifty or lowered the voting age to five, hose policies really would vi¬
ola e our concepts of "child" and "adult:' fuzzy though their boundaries may
be. In thesame way,we can bring our concepts of life and mind into register
with biological reality without necessarily slipping down a slope.

when A 1999 cyclone in India left millions of people in danger of starva¬
tion, some activists denounced relief societies for distributing a nutritious
grain meal because it contained genetically modified varieties of corn and soy¬
beans (varieties that had been eaten without apparent harm in the United
States). These activists are also opposed to "golden rice:' a genetically modified
variety that could prevent blindness in millions of children in the developing
world and alleviate vitamin A deficiency in a quarter of a billion more." Other
activists have vandalized research facilities at which the safety of genetically
modified foods is tested and new varieties are developed. For these people,
even the possibility that such foods could be safe is unacceptable.

A 2001 report by the European Union reviewed eighty-one research proj¬
ects conducted over fifteen years and failed to find any new risks to human
health or to the environment posed by genetically modified crops." This is no
surprise to a biologist. Genetically modified foods are no more dangerous
than "natural" foods because they are not fundamentally different from natu¬
ral foods. Virtually every animal and vegetable sold in a health-food store has
been "genetically modified" for millennia by selective breeding and hybridiza¬
tion. The wild ancestor of carrots was a thin, bitter white root; the ancestor of
com had an inch-long, easily shattered cob with a few small, rock-hard ker¬
nels. Plants are Darwinian creatures with no particular desire to be eaten, so
they did not go out of their way to be tasty, healthy, or easy for us to grow and
harvest. On the contrary: they did go out of their way to deteras from eating
them,b v 1 in irritants, toxins, and bitter-tasting compounds." o there i
n thing e pe i 1 afeabou natural foo . The "natural" method of selective
breeding for pest resistance simply increases the concentration of the plant's
own poisons; one variety of natural potato had to be withdrawn from the mar¬
ket because it proved to be toxic to people." Similarly, natural flavors-de-
fined by one food scientist as "a flavor that's been derived with an out-of-date
technology"-are often chemically indistinguishable from their artificial

Out of Our Depths / 229

counterparts, and when they are distinguishable, sometimes the natural flavor
is the more dangerous one. When "natural" almond flavor, benzaldehyde, is
derived from peach pits, it is accompanied by traces of cyanide; when it is syn¬
thesized as an "artificial flavor," it is not."

A blanket fear of all artificial and genetically modified foods is patently ir¬
rational on health grounds, and it could make food more expensive and hence
less available to the poor. Where do these specious fears come from? Partly
they arise from the carcinogen-du-jour school of journalism that uncritically
reports any study showing elevated cancer rates in rats fed megadoses of
chemicals. But partly they come from an intuition about living things that was
first identified by the anthropologist James George Frazer in 1890 and has re¬
cently been studied in the lab by Paul Rozin, Susan Gelman, Frank Keil, Scott
Atran, and other cognitive scientists."

. People's intuitive biology begins with the concept of an invisible essence
residing in living things, which gives them their form and powers. These es-
sentialist beliefs emerge early in childhood, and in traditional cultures they
dominate reasoning about plants and animals. Often the intuitions serve peo¬
ple well. They allow preschoolers to deduce that a raccoon that looks like a
skunk will have raccoon babies, that a seed taken from an apple and planted
with flowers in a pot will produce an apple tree, and that an animal’s behavior
depends on its innards, not on its appearance. They allow traditional peoples
to deduce that different-looking creatures (such as a caterpillar and abutter-
fly) can belong to the same kind, and they impel them to extract juices and
powders from living things and try them as medicines, poisons, and food sup¬
plements. They can prevent people from sickening themselves by eating things
that have been in contact with infectious substances such as feces, sick people,
and rotting meat."

But intuitive essentialism can also lead people into error." hildren
f: Isely believe that a child of nglish-speaking parents will speak En li h even
if brought up in a French-speaking family, and that boys will have short hair
and girls will wear dresses even if they are brought up with no other member
of their sex from which they can learn those habits. Traditional peoples believe
in sympathetic magic, otherwise known as voodoo. They think similar¬
looking objects have similar powers, so that a ground-up rhinoceros horn is a
cure for erectile dysfunction. And they think that animal parts can transmit
their powers to anything they mingle with, so that eating or wearing a part of
a fierce animal will make one fierce.

Educated Westerners should not feel too smug. Rozin has shown that we
have voodoolike intuitions ourselves. Most Americans won't touch a sterilized
cockroach, or even a plastic one, and won't drink juice that the roach has
touched for even a fraction of a second." And even IvyLeague students believe
that you are what you eat. They judge that a tribe that hunts turtles for their

230/Know Thyself

meat and wild boar for their bristles will be good swimmers, and that a tribe
that hunts turtles for their shells and wild boar for their meat will be tough
fighters." In his history of biology, Ernst Mayr showed that many biologists
originally rejected the theory of natural selection because of their belief that a
species was a pure type defined by an essence. They could not wrap their
minds around the concept that species are populations of variable individuals
and that one can blend into another over evolutionary time."

In this context, the fear of genetically modified foods no longer seems so
strange: it is simply the standard human intuition that every living thing has
an essence. Natural foods are thought to have the pure essence of the plant or
animal and to carry with them the rejuvenating powers of the pastoral envi¬
ronment in which they grew. Genetically modified foods, or foods containing
artificial additives, are thought of as being deliberately laced with a contami¬
nant tainted by its origins in an acrid laboratory or factory. Arguments that in¬
voke genetics, biochemistry, evolution, and risk analysis are likely to fall on
deaf ears when pitted against this deep-rooted way of thinking.

Essentialist intuitions are not the only reason that perceptions of danger
can be off the mark. Risk analysts have discovered to their bemusement that
people's fears are often way out of line with objective haz$|ds. Many people
avoid flying, though car travel is eleven times more dangerous. They fear get¬
ting eaten by a shark, though they are four hundred times more likely to
drown in their bathtub. They clamor for expensive measures to get chloroform
and trichloroethylene out of drinking water, though they are hundreds of
times more likely to get cancer from a daily peanut butter sandwich (since
peanuts can carry a highly carcinogenic mold)." Some of these risks may be
misestimated because they tap into our innate fears of heights, confinement,
predation, and poisoning." But even when people are presented with objec¬
tive information about danger, they may not appreciate it because of the way
the mind assesses probabilities.

A statement like "The chance of dying of botulism poisoning in a given
year is .000001" is virtually incomprehensible. For one thing, magnitudes with
lots of zeroes at the beginning or end are beyond the ken of our number sense.
The psychologist Paul Slovic and his colleagues found that people are un¬
moved by a lecture on the hazards of not wearing a seat belt which mentions
that a fatal collision occurs once in every 3.5 million person-trips. But they say
they will buckle up when the odds are recalculated to show that their lifetime
chance of dying in a collision is one percent."

The other reason for the incomprehensibility of many statistics is that the
probability of a single event, such as my dying in a plane crash (as opposed to
the frequency of some events relative to others, such as the proportion of all
airline passengers who die in crashes), is a genuinely puzzling concept, even
to mathematicians. What sense can we make of the odds offered by expert

Out of Our Depths / 231

bookmakers for particular events, such as that the Archbishop of Canterbury
will confirm the second coming within a year (1000 to 1), that a Mr. Braham
of Luton, England, will invent a perpetual motion machine (250 to 1), or that
Elvis Presley is alive and well (1000 to 1)?40 Either Elvis is alive or he isn't, so
what does it mean to say that the probability that he is alive is .001 ? Similarly,
what should we think when aviation safety analysts tell us that n average a
ingle landing in a commer ial airliner reduce one' lieexpectanc b fi t n
minute? When the plane comes down, either my life expectancy will be re¬
duced by a lot more than fifteen minutes or it won't be reduced at all. Some
mathematicians say that the probability of a single event is more like a gut feel¬
ing of confidence, expressed on a scale ofctto l,than a meaningful mathemat¬
ical quantity,"

The mind is more comfortable in reckoning probabilities in terms of the
relative frequency of remembered or im agi necf events.' ,2 $’hat can make recent
and memorable events-a plane crash, a shark attack, an anthrax infection-s-
loom larger in one's worry list than more frequent and boring events, such as
the car crashes and ladder falls that get printed beneath the fold on page B14.
And it can lead risk experts to speak one language and ordinary people to hear
another. In hearings for a proposed nuclear waste site, an expert might present
a fault tree that lays out the conceivable sequences of events by which radioac¬
tivity might escape. For example, erosion, cracks in the bedrock, accidental
drilling, or improper sealing might cause the release of radioactivity into
groundwater. In turn, groundwater movement, volcanic activity, or an impact
of a large meteorite might cause the release of radioactive wastes into the bio¬
sphere . Each train of events can be assigned a probability, and the aggregate
probability of an accident from all the causes can be estimated. When people
hear these analyses, however, they are not reassured but become more fearful
than ever-they hadn't realized there are so many ways for something to go
wrong! They mentally tabulate the number of disaster scenarios, rather than
mentally aggregating the probabilities of the disaster scenarios."

None of this implies that people are dunces or that "experts" should ram
unwanted technologies down their throats. Even with a complete understand¬
ing of the risks, reasonable people might choose to forgo certain technological
advances. If something is viscerally revolting, a democracy should allow peo¬
ple to reject it whether or not it is "rational" by some criterion that ignores our
psychology. Many people would reject vegetables grown in sanitized human
waste and would avoid an elevator with a glass floor, not because they believe
these things are dangerous but because the thought gives them the willies. If
they have the same reaction to eating genetically modified foods or living next
to a nuclear power plant, they should have the option of rejecting them, too, as
long as they do not try to force their preferences on others or saddle them with
the costs.

232/Know Thyself

Also, even if technocrats provide reasonable estimates of a risk (which is
itself an iffy enterprise), they cannot dictate what level of risk people ought to
accept. People might object to a nuclear power plant that has a minuscule risk
of a meltdown not because they overestimate the risk but because they feel
that the costs of the catastrophe, no matter how remote, are too dreadful. And
ofcourse any ofthese tradeoffs may be unacceptable if people perceive that the
benefits would go to the wealthy and powerful while they themselves absorb
the risks.

Nonetheless, understanding the difference between our best science and
our ancient ways of thinking can only make our individual and collective de¬
cisions better informed. It can help scientists and journalists explain a new
technology in the face of the most common misunderstandings. And it can
help all of us understand the technology so that we can accept or reject it on
grounds that we can justify to ourselves and to others.

IN THE WEALTH of NATIONS, Adam Smith wrote that there is "a certain
propensity in human nature ... to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for
another." The exchange ofgoods and favors is a human universal and may have
an ancient history. In archaeological sites tens of millennia old, pretty seashells
and sharp flints are found hundreds of miles from their sources, which sug¬
gests that they got there by networks of trade."

The anthropologist Alan Fiske has surveyed the ethnographic literature
and found that virtually all human transactions fall into four patterns, each
with a distinctive psychology." The first is m harin : groups ofpeo-

ple, such "as the members of a family, share things without keeping track of
who gets what. The second is orit i : dominant people confiscate

what they want from lower-ranking ones. But the other two types of transac¬
tions are defined by exchanges.

The most common kind of exchange is what Fiske calls qua ity Match¬
ing. Two people exchange goods or favors at different times, and the ti^ecr
items are identical or at least highly similar or easily comparable. The trading
partners assess their debts by simple addition or subtraction and are satisfied
when the favors even out. The partners feel that the exchange binds them in a
relationship, and often people will consummate exchanges just to maintain it.
For example, in the trading rings of the Pacific Islands, gifts circulate from
chief to chief, and the original giver may eventually get his gift back. (Nfany
Americans suspect that this is what happens to Christmas fruitcakes.) When
someone violates an Equality Matching relationship by taking a benefit
without returning it in kind, the other party feels cheated and may retaliate ag¬
gressively. Equality Matching is the only mechanism of trade in most hunter-
gatherer societies. Fiske notes that it is supported by a mental model of
tit-for-tat reciprocity, and Leda Cosmides and John Tooby have shown that

Out of Our Depths / 233

this way of thinking comes easily to Americans as well." It appears to be the
core of our intuitive economics.

Fiske contrasts Equality Matching with a very different system called ar-

Pricin the system of rents, prices, wages, and interest rates that underlies
modern economies. Market Pricing relies on the mathematics of multiplica¬
tion, division, fractions, and large numbers, together with the social institu¬
tions of money, credit, written contracts, and complex divisions of labor.
Market Pricing is absent in hunter-gatherer societies, and we know it played
no role in our evolutionary history because it relies on technologies like writ¬
ing, money, .and formal mathematics, which appeared only recently. Even
today the exchanges carried out by Market Pricing may involve causal chains
that are impossible for any individual to grasp in full. I press some keys to
enter characters into this manuscript today and entitle myself to receive some
groceries years from now, not because I will barter a copy of The BlankSlateto
a banana grower but because of a tangled web of third and fourth and fifth
parties (publishers, booksellers, truckers, commodity brokers) that I depend
on without fully understanding what they do.

When people have different ideas about which of these four modes of in¬
teracting applies to a current relationship, the result can range from blank in¬
comprehension to acute discomfort or outright hostility. Think about a
dinner guest offering to pay the host for her meal, a person barking an order to
a friend, or an employee helping himself to a shrimp off the boss's plate. Mis¬
understandings in which one person thinks of a transaction in terms of Equal¬
ity Matching and another thinks in terms of Market Pricing are even more
pervasive and can be even more dangerous. They tap into very different psy¬
chologies, one of them intuitive and universal, the other rarefied and learned,
and clashes between them have been common in economic history.

Economists refer to "the h ical a a the belief that an object has a
true and constant value, as opposed to being worth only what someone is will¬
ing to pay for it at a given place and time." This is simply the difference be¬
tween the Equality Matching and Market Pricing mentalities. The physical
fallacy may not arise when three chickens are exchanged for one knife, but
when the exchanges are mediated by money, credit, and third parties, the fal¬
lacy can have ugly consequences, he belie that goods have a "ju t prue im-
plie hrt it i avariciou to charge anything higher, and the re ul b en
mandatory pricing cherne in medieval times, communi t regime, and many
World untri . uch attempts to work around the law of supply and
deman e usually led to waste, shortages, and black markets. Another con -
equence of the physical fallacy is the widespread practice of ing inter-

t, hich comes from the intuition that it is rapacious to demand additional
money from someone who has paid back exactly what he borrowed. Of
course, the only reason people borrow at one time and repay it later is that the

234 / Know Thyself

money is worth more to them at the time they borrow it than it will be at the
time they repay it. So when regimes enact sweeping usury laws, people who
could put money to productive use cannot get it, and everyone's standards of
living go down."

Just as the value of something may change with time, which creates a niche
for lenders who move valuable things around in time, so it may change with
space, which creates a niche for middlemen who move valuable things around
in space. A banana is worth more to me in a store down the street than it is in
a warehouse a hundred miles away, so I am willing to pay more to the grocer
than I would to the importer-even though by "eliminating the middleman" I
could pay less per banana. For similar reasons, the importer is willing to charge
the grocer less than he would charge me.

But because lenders and middlemen do not cause tangible objects to come
into being, their contributions are difficult to grasp, and they are often
thought of as skimmers and parasites, recurrin i uman hi tor i

the ou reak o g ettoization, confi cati n ul ion, and mob violen
gainst riiddlemen, o en ethnic minorities who learned to specialize in the
middleman niche." The Jews in Europe are the most familiar example, but the
expatriate Chinese, the Lebanese, the Armenians, and the Gujeratis and Chett-
yars of India have suffered similar histories of persecution.

One economist in an unusual situation showed how the physical fallacy
does not depend on any unique historical circumstance but easily arises from
human psychology. He watched the entire syndrome emerge before his eyes
when he spent time in a World War II prisoner-of-war camp. Every month the
prisoners received identical packages from the Red Cross. A few prisoners cir¬
culated through the camp, trading and lending chocolates, cigarettes, and other
commodities among prisoners who valued some items more than others or
who had used up their own rations before the end of the month. The middle¬
men made a small profit from each transaction, and as a result they were deeply
resented-a microcosm of the tragedy of the middleman minority. The econ¬
omist wrote: "[The middleman's) function, and his hard work in bringing
buyer and seller together, were ignored; profits were not regarded as a reward
for labour, but as the result of sharp practises. Despite the fact that his very ex¬
istence was proofto the contrary, the middleman was held to be redundant."50

The obvious cure for the tragic shortcomings of human intuition in a
high-tech world is education. And this offers priorities for educational policy:
to provide students with the cognitive tools that are most important for grasp¬
ing the modern world and that are most unlike the cognitive tools they are born
with. e peril u an in thi per, or e am I , uld

iv hi h ri rit to ec nomi , o u ionary i D , Hit an

i tics in any hig ri u m. nfortunately, most curricula

have barely changed since medieval times, and are barely changeable, because

Out of Our Depths / 235

no one wants to be the philistine who seems to be saying that it is unimportant
to learn a foreign language, or English literature, or trigonometry, or the clas¬
sics. But no matter how valuable a subject may be, there are only twenty-four
hours in a day, and a decision to teach one subject is also a decision not to teach
another one. The question is not whether trigonometry is important, but
whether it is more important than statistics; not whether an educated person
should know the classics, but whether it is more important for an educated per¬
son to know the classics than to know elementary economics. In a world whose
complexities are constantly challenging our intuitions, these tradeoffs cannot
responsibly be avoided.

"OUR NATURE IS an illimitable space through which the intelligence moves
without coming to an end," wrote the poet Wallace Stevens in 1951. 51 The lim-
itlessness of intelligence comes from the power of a combinatorial system. Just
as a few notes can combine into any melody and a few characters can combine
into any printed text, a few ideaS-PERSON, PLACE, THING, CAUSE, CHANGE,
MOVE, AND, OR, NOT-can combine into an illimitable space ofthoughts.P The
ability to conceive an unlimited number of new combinations of ideas is the
powerhouse of human intelligence and a key to our success as a species. Tens of
thousands of years ago our ancestors conceived new sequences of actions that
could drive game, extract a poison, treat an illness, or secure an alliance. The
modern mind can conceive of a substance as a combination of atoms, the plan
for a living thing as the combination of DNA nucleotides, and a relationship
among quantities as a combination of mathematical symbols. Language, itself
a combinatorial system, allows us to share these intellectual fruits.

The combinatorial powers of the human mind can help explain a paradox,
about the place of our species on the planet. Two hundred years ago the econ¬
omist Thomas Malthus (1766-1834) called attention to two enduring features
of human nature. One is that "food is necessary for the existence of man." The
other is that "the passion between the sexes is necessary and will remain nearly
in its present state:' He famously deduced:

The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the
earth to produce subsistence for man. Population, when unchecked,
increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arith¬
metic ratio. A slight acquaintance with numbers will show the immen¬
sity of the first power in comparison with the second.

Malthus depressingly concluded that an increasing proportion of humanity
would starve, and that efforts to aid them would only lead to more misery be¬
cause the poor would breed children doomed to hunger in their turn. Many
recent prophets of gloom reiterated his argument. In 1967 William and Paul

236/Know Thyself

Paddock wrote a book called Famine 1975! and in 1970 the biologist Paul
Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb, predicted that sixty-five million
Americans and four billion other people would starve to death in the 1980s. In
1972 a group of big thinkers known as the Club of Rome predicted that either
natural resources would suffer from catastrophic declines in the ensuing de¬
cades or that the world would choke in pollutants.

The Malthusian predictions of the 1970s have been disconfirmed. Ehrlich
was wrong both about the four billion victims of starvation and about declin¬
ing resources. In 1980 he bet the economist Julian Simon that five strategic
metals would become increasingly scarce by the end of the decade and would
thus rise in price. He lost five out of five bets. The famines and shortages never
happened, despite increases both in the number of people on Earth (now six
billion and counting) and in the amount of energy and resources consumed
by each oneHorrific famines still occur, of course, but not because of a
worldwide discrepancy between the number of mouths and the amount of
food. The economist Amartya Sen has shown that they can almost always be
traced to short-lived conditions or to political and military upheavals that pre¬
vent food from reaching the people who need it,54

The state of our planet is a vital concern, and we need the clearest possible
understanding ofwhere the problems lie so as not to misdirect our efforts. The
repeated failure ofsimple Malthusian thinking shows that it cannot be the best
way to analyze environmental challenges. Still, Malthus's logic seems impecca¬
ble. Where did it go wrong?

The immediate problem with Malthusian prophecies is that they underes¬
timate the effects of technological change in increasing the resources that sup¬
port a comfortable life." In the twentieth century food supplies increased
exponentially, not linearly. Farmers grew more crops on a given plot of land.
Processors transformed more of the crops into edible food. Trucks, ships, and
planes got the food to more people before it spoiled or was eaten by pests. Re¬
serves of oil and minerals increased, rather than decreased, because engineers
could find more of them and figure out new ways to get at them.

Many people are reluctant to grant technology this seemingly miraculous
role. A technology booster sounds too much like the earnest voiceover in a
campy futuristic exhibit at the world's fai . dina ogy ayhav u h u a
mporary reprieve, one mi ht t jink, hut it i not a ource of inex u tibl
rna i . It annot refute the laws of mathematics, which pit exponential popu¬
lation growth against finite, or at best arithmetically increasing, resources. Op¬
timism would seem to require a faith that the circle can be squared.

But recently the economist Paul Romerhas invoked the combinatorial na¬
ture of cognitive information processing to show how the circle might be
squared after all. 56 He begins by pointing out that human material existence is
limited by ideas, not by stuff. People don't need coal or copper wire or paper

Out of Our Depths / 237

per se: they need ways to heat their homes, communicate with other people,
and store information. Those needs don’t have to be satisfied by increasing the
availability of physical resources. They can be satisfied by using new ideas-
recipes, designs, or techniques-to rearrange existing resources to yield more
of what we want. For example, petroleum used to be just a contaminant of
water wells; then it became a source of fuel, replacing the declining supply of
whale oil. Sand was once used to make glass; now it is used to make microchips
and optical fiber.

Romer's second point is that ideas are what economists call "nonrival
goods:’ Rival goods, such as food, fuel, and tools, are made of matter and en¬
ergy. If one person uses them, others cannot, as we recognize in the saying
"Youcan't eat your cake and have it." But ideas are made of information , which
can be duplicated at negligible cost. A recipe for bread, a blueprint for a build¬
ing, a technique for growing rice, a formula for a drug, a useful scientific law,
or a computer program can be given away without anything being subtracted
from the giver. The seemingly magical proliferation of nonrival goods has re¬
cently confronted us with new problems concerning intellectual property, as
we try to adapt a legal system that was based on owning stuff to the problem
of owning information-such as musical recordings-that can easily be
shared over the Internet.

The power of nonrival goods may have been a presence throughout
human evolutionary history. The anthropologists John Tooby and Irven De-
Vorehave argued that millions ofyears ago our ancestors occupied the "cogni¬
tive niche" in the world's ecosystem. By evolving mental computations that
can model the causal texture of the environment, hominids could play out sce¬
narios in their mind's eye and figure out new ways of exploiting the rocks,
plants, and animals around them. Human practical intelligence may have co¬
evolved with language (which allows know-how to be shared at low cost) and
with social cognition (which allows people to cooperate without being
cheated), yielding a species that literally lives by the power of ideas.

Romer points out that the combinatorial process of creating new ideas
can circumvent the logic ofMalthus:

Every generation has perceived the limits to growth that finite resources
and undesirable side effects would pose if no new recipes or ideas were
discovered. And every generation has underestimated the potential for
finding new recipes and ideas. We consistently fail to grasp how many
ideas remain to be discovered. The difficulty is the same one we have
with compounding. Possibilities do not add up. They multiply. 57

For example, a hundred chemical elements, combined serially four at a time
and in ten different proportions, can yield 330 billion compounds. If scientists

238 / Know Thyself

evaluated them at a rate of a thousand a day, it would take them a million years
to work through the possibilities. The number of ways of assembling instruc¬
tions into computer programs or parts into machines is equally mind-
boggling. At least in principle, the exponential power of human cognition
works on the same scale as the growth of the human population, and we can
resolve the paradox of the Malthusian disaster that never happened. None of
this licenses complacency about our use of natural resources, of course. The
fact that the space of possible ideas is staggeringly large does not mean that the
solution to a given problem lies in that space or that we will find it by the time
we need it. It only means that our understanding of humans' relation to the
material world has to acknowledge not just our bodies and our resources but
also our minds.

THE TRUISM THAT all good things come with costs as well as benefits applies
in full to the combinatorial powers of the human mind. If the mind is a bio¬
logical organ rather than a window onto reality, there should be truths that are
literally inconceivable, and limits to how well we can ever grasp the discover¬
ies of science.

The possibility that we might come to the end of our cognitive rope has
been brought home by modern physics. We have every reason to believe that
the best theories in physics are true, but they present us with a picture of real¬
ity that makes no sense to the intuitions about space, time, and matter that
evolved in the brains of middle-sized primates. The strange ideas ofphysics-
for instance, that time came into existence with the Big Bang, that the universe
is curved in the fourth dimension and possibly finite, and that a particle may
act like a wave-just make our heads hurt the more we ponder them. It's im¬
possible to stop thinking thoughts that are literally incoherent, such as "What
was it like before the BigBang?"or "What lies beyond the edgeofthe universe?"
or "How does the damn particle manage to pass through two slits at the same
time?" Even the physicists who discovered the nature of reality claim not to un¬
derstand their theories. Murray Gell-Mann described quantum mechanics as
"that mysterious, confusing discipline which none of us really understands but
which we know how to use.?" Richard Feynman wrote, "I think I can safely say
that no one understands quantum mechanics.... Do not keep asking yourself,
if you can possibly avoid it, 'But how can it be like that?' ... Nobody knows
how it can be like that."? In another interview, he added, "If you think you un¬
derstand quantum theory, you don't understand quantum theoryl'"?

Our intuitions about life and mind, like our intuitions about matter and
space, may have run up against a strange world forged by our best science. We
have seen how the concept of life as a magical spirit united with our bodies
doesn't get along with our understanding of the mind as the activity ofa grad¬
ually developing brain. Other intuitions about the mind find themselves just

Out of OUf Depths / 239

as flat-footed in pursuit of the advancing frontier of cognitive neuroscience.
We have every reason to believe that consciousness and decision making arise
from the electrochemical activity of neural networks in the brain. But how
moving molecules should throw off subjective feelings (as opposed to mere
intelligent computations) and how they bring about choices that we freely
make (as opposed to behavior that is caused) remain deep enigmas to our
Pleistocene psyches.

These puzzles have an infuriatingly holistic quality to them. Conscious¬
ness and free will seem to suffuse the neurobiological phenomena at every
level, and cannot be pinpointed to any combination or. interaction among
parts. The best analyses from our combinatorial intellects provide no hooks
on which we can hang these strange entities, and thinkers seem condemned ei¬
ther to denying their existence or to wallowing in mysticism. For better or
worse, our world might always contain a wisp of mystery, and our descendants
might endlessly ponder the age-old conundrums of religion and philosophy,
which ultimately hinge on concepts of matter and mind.?! Ambrose Bierce's
The Devil's Dictionary contains the following entry:

Mind, n. A mysterious form of matter secreted by the brain. Its chief ac¬
tivity consists in the endeavor to ascertain its own nature, the futility of
the attempt being due to the fact that it has nothing but itself to know it¬
self with.

240/ Know Thyself

Chapter 14

The Many Roots of Our Suffering

THE FIRST EDITION of Richard Dawkins's The Selfish Gene contained a fore¬
word by the biologist who originated some of its key ideas) Robert Trivers. He
closed with a flourish:

Darwinian social theory gives us a glimpse of an underlying symmetry
and logic in social relationships which) when more fully comprehended
by ourselves) should revitalize our political understanding and provide
the intellectual support for a science and medicine of psychology.In the
process it should also give us a deeper understanding of the many roots
of our suffering. 1

These were arresting claims for a book on biology) but Trivers knew he was
onto something. Social psychology) the science of how people behave toward
one another) is often a mishmash of interesting phenomena that are "ex¬
plained" by giving them fancy names. Missing is the rich deductive structure
of other sciences) in which a few deep principles can generate a wealth of sub¬
tle predictions-the kind of theory that scientists praise as "beautiful" or "ele¬
gant," Trivers derived the first theory in social psychology that deserves to be
called elegant. He showed that a deceptively simple principle-follow the
genes-ean explain the logic of each of the major kinds of human relation¬
ships: how we feel toward our parents) our children) our siblings, our lovers)
our friends) and ourselves.' But Trivers knew that the theory did something
else as well. It. offered a scientific explanation for the tragedy of the human
condition.

"Nature is a hanging judge," goes an old saying. Many tragedies come from
our physical and cognitive makeup. Our bodies are extraordinarily improba¬
ble arrangements of matter) with many ways for things to go wrong and only a
few ways for things to go right. We are certain to die) and smart enough to
know it. Our minds are adapted to a world that no longer exists) prone to mis-

The Many Roots of Our Suffering / 241

understandings correctable only by arduous education, and condemned to
perplexity about the deepest questions we can entertain.

But some of the most painful shocks come from, the social world-from
the manipulations and betrayals of other people. According to the fable, a
scorpion asked a frog to carry him across a river, reassuring the frog that he
wouldn't sting him because if he did, he would drown too. Halfway across, the
scorpion did sting him, and when the sinking frog asked why, the scorpion
replied, "It's in my nature:' Technically speaking, a scorpion with this nature
could not have evolved, but Trivers has explained why it sometimes seems as if
human nature is like the fabled scorpion nature, condemned to apparently
pointless conflict.

It's no mystery why organisms sometimes harm one another. Evolution
has no conscience, and if one creature hurts another to benefit itself, such as by
eating, parasitizing, intimidating, or cuckolding it, its descendants will come
to predominate, complete with those nasty habits. All this is familiar from the
vernacular sense of "Darwinian" as a synonym for "ruthless" and from Ten¬
nyson's depiction of nature as red in tooth and claw. If that were all there was
to the evolution of the human condition, we would have to agree with the rock
song: Life sucks, then you die.

But of course life doesn't alwayssuck. Many creatures cooperate, nurture,
and make peace, and humans in particular find comfort and joy in their fam¬
ilies, friends, and communities. This, too, should be familiar to readers of The
Selfish Gene and the other books on the evolution of altruism that have ap¬
peared in the years since.' There are several reasons why organisms may evolve
a willingness to do good deeds. They may help other creatures while pursuing
their own interests, say, when they form a herd that confuses predators or live
off each other's by-products. This is called mutualism, symbiosis, or coopera¬
tion. Among humans, friends who have common tastes, hobbies, or enemies
are a kind of symbiont pair. The two parents of a brood of children are an even
better example. Their genes are tied up in the same package, their children, so
what is good for one is good for the other, and each has an interest in keeping
the other alive and healthy. These shared interests set the stage for compan¬
ionate love and marital love to evolve.

And in some cases organisms may benefit other organisms at a cost to
themselves, which biologists call altruism. Altruism in this technical sense can
evolve in two main ways. First, since relatives share genes, any gene that inclines
an organism toward helping a relative will increase the chance of survival of a
copy ofitself that sits inside that relative, even if the helper sacrifices its own fit¬
ness in the generous act. Such genes will, on average, come to predominate, as
long as the cost to the helper is less than the benefit to the recipient discounted
by their degree of relatedness. Family love-the cherishing of children, sib-

242 / Know Thyself

lings, parents, grandparents, uncles and aunts, nieces and nephews, and
cousins-can evolve.This is called nepotistic altruism.

Altruism can also evolve when organisms trade favors. One helps another
by grooming, feeding, protecting, or backing him, and is helped in turn when
the needs reverse. This is called reciprocal altruism, and it can evolve when the
parties recognize each other, interact repeatedly, can confer a large benefit on
others at small cost to themselves, keep a memory for favors offered or denied,
and are impelled to reciprocate accordingly. Reciprocal altruism can evolve
because cooperators do better than hermits or misanthropes. They enjoy the
gains of trading their surpluses, pulling ticks out of one another's hair, saving
each other from drowning or starvation, and baby-sitting each other's chil¬
dren. Reciprocators can also do better over the long run than the cheaters who
take favors without returning them, because the reciprocators will come to
recognize the cheaters and shun or punish them.

The demands of reciprocal altruism can explain why the social and moral¬
istic emotions evolved. Sympathy and trust prompt people to extend the first
favor. Gratitude and loyalty prompt them to repay favors. Guilt and shame
deter them from hurting or failing to repay others. Anger and contempt
prompt them to avoid or punish cheaters. And among humans, any tendency
of an individual to reciprocate or cheat does not have to be witnessed firsthand
but can be recounted by language. This leads to an interest in the reputation of
others, transmitted by gossip and public approval or condemnation, and a
concern with one's own reputation. Partnerships, friendships, alliances, and
communities can emerge, cemented by these emotions and concerns.

Many people start to get nervous at this point, but the discomfort is not
from the tragedies that Trivers explained. It comes instead from two miscon¬
ceptions, each of which we have encountered before. First, all this talk about
genes that influence behavior does not mean that we are cuckoo clocks or
player pianos, mindlessly executing the dictates of DNA.The genes in question
are those that endow us with the neural systemsfor conscience, deliberation,
and will, and when we talk about the selection of such genes, we are talking
about the various ways those faculties could have evolved. The error comes
from the Blank Slate and the Ghost in the Machine: if one starts off thinking
that our higher mental faculties are stamped in by society or inhere in a soul,
then when biologists mention genetic influence the first alternatives that come
to mind are puppet strings or trolley tracks. But if higher faculties, including
learning, reason, and choice, are products of a nonrandom organization of the
brain, there have to be genes that help do the organizing, and that raises the
question of how those genes would have been selected in the course of human
evolution.

The second misconception is to imagine that talk about costs and benefits

The Many Roots of Our Suffering / 243

implies that people are Machiavellian cynics, coldly calculating the genetic
advantages of befriending and marrying. To fret over this picture, or de¬
nounce it because it is ugly, is to confuse proximate and ultimate causation.
People don't care about their genes; they care about happiness, love, power,
respect, and other passions. The cost-benefit calculations are a metaphorical
way of describing the selection of alternative genes over millennia, not a lit¬
eral description of what takes place in a human brain in real time. Nothing
prevents the amoral process of natural selection from evolving a brain with
genuine big-hearted emotions. It is said that those who appreciate legislation
and sausages should not see them being made. The same is true for human
emotions.

So if love and conscience can evolve, where's the tragedy? Trivers noticed
that the confluence of genetic interests that gave rise to the social emotions is
only partial. Because we are not clones, or even social insects (who can share
up to three-quarters of their genes), what ultimately is best for one person is
not identical to what ultimately is best for another. Thus every human rela¬
tionship, even the most devoted and intimate, carries the seeds of conflict. In
the movie AntZ, an ant with the voice of Woody Allen complains to his psy¬
choanalyst:

It's this whole gung-ho superorganism thing that I just can 'tget. I try, but

I just don't get it. What is it. I'm supposed to do everything for the

colony and ... what about my needs?

The humor comes from the clash between ant psychology, which originates in
a genetic system that makes workers more closely related to one another than
they would be to their offspring, and human psychology, in which our genetic
distinctness leads us to ask, "What about my needs?" Trivers, following on the
work of William Hamilton and George Williams, did some algebra that pre¬
dicts the extent to which people should ask themselves that question."

The. rest of this chapter is about that deceptively simple algebra and how
its implications overturn many conceptions of human nature. It discredits the
Blank Slate, which predicts that people's regard for their fellows is determined
by their "role;' as if it were a part assigned arbitrarily to an actor. But it also dis¬
credits some naive views of evolution that are common among people who
don't believe in the Blank Slate. Most people have intuitions about the natural
state of affairs. They may believe that if we acted as nature "wants" us to, fam¬
ilies would function as harmonious units, or individuals would act for the
good of the species, or people would show the true selves beneath their social
masks, or, as Newt Gingrich said in 1995, the male of our species would hunt
giraffes and wallow in ditches like little piglets." Understanding the patterns of
genetic overlap that bind and divide us can replace simplistic views of all kinds

244 / Know Thyself

with a more subtle understanding of the human condition. Indeed, it can illu¬
minate the human condition in ways that complement the insights of artists
and philosophers through the millennia.

THE most obvious human tragedy comes from the difference between our
feelings toward kin and our feelings toward non-kin, one of the deepest di¬
vides in the living world. When it comes to love and solidarity among people,
the relative viscosity of blood and water is evident in everything from the clans
and dynasties of traditional societies to the clogging of airports during holi¬
days with people traveling across the world to be with their families.? It has
also been borne out by quantitative studies. In traditional foraging societies,
genetic relatives are more likely to live together, work in each other's gardens,
protect each other, and adopt each other's needy or orphaned children, and are
less likely to attack, feud with, and kill each other," Even in modern societies,
which tend to sunder ties of kinship, the more closely two people aregeneti-
cally related, the more inclined they are to come to one another's aid, especially
in life-or-death situations,"

But love and solidarity are relative. To say that people are more caring to¬
ward their relatives is to say that they are more callous toward their nonrela¬
tives. The epigraph to Robert Wright's book on evolutionary psychology is an
excerpt from Graham Greene's The Power and the Gloryin which the protago¬
nist broods about his daughter: “He said, 'Oh god, help her. Damn me, I de¬
serve it, but let her live forever.' This was the love he should have felt for every
soul in the world: all the fear and the wish to save concentrated unjustly on the

one child. He began to weep_He thought: This is what I should feel all the

time for everyone."

Family love indeed subverts the ideal of what we should feel for every soul
in the world. Moral philosophers play with a hypothetical dilemma in which
people can run through the left door of a burning building to save some num¬
ber of children or through the right door to save their own child." If you are a
parent, ponder this question: Is there any number of children that would lead
you to pick the left door? Indeed, all of us reveal our preference with our pock-
etbooks when we spend money on trifles for our own children (a bicycle, or¬
thodontics, an education at a private school or university) instead of saving
the lives of unrelated children in the developing world by donating the money
to charity. Similarly, the practice of parents bequeathing their wealth to their
children is one of the steepest impediments to an economically egalitarian so¬
ciety. Yetfew people would allow the government to confiscate 100 percent of
their estate, because most people see their children as an extension of them¬
selves and thus as the proper beneficiaries of their lifelong striving.

Nepotism is a universal human bent and a universal scourge of large Or¬
ganizations. It is notorious for sapping countries led by hereditary dynasties

The Many Roots of Our Suffering / 245

and for bogging down governments and businesses in the Third World. A re¬
curring historic solution was to give positions of local power to people who
had no family ties, such as eunuchs, celibates, slaves, or people a long way from
home. 10 A more recent solution is to outlaw or regulate nepotism, though the
regulations alwayscome with tradeoffs and exceptions. Small businesses-or,
as they are often called, "family businesses" or "Mom-and-Pop businesses"-
are highly nepotistic, and thereby can conflict with principles of equal oppor¬
tunity and earn the resentment of the surrounding community.

B. F. Skinner, ever the Maoist, wrote in the 1970s that people should be re¬
warded for eating in large communal dining halls rather than at home with
their families, because large pots have a lower ratio of surface area to volume
than small pots and hence are more energy efficient. The logic is impeccable,
but this mindset collided with human nature many times in the twentieth cen-
tury-horrifically in the forced collectivizations in the Soviet Union and
China, and benignly in the Israeli kibbutzim, which quickly abandoned their
policy of rearing children separately from their parents. A character in a novel
by the Israeli writer Batya Gur captures the kind of sentiment that led to this
change: "I want to tuck in my children at night myself... and when they have
a nightmare I want them to come to my bed, not to some intercom, and not to
make them go out at night in the dark looking for our room, stumbling over
stones, thinking that every shadow is a monster, and in the end standing in
front of a closed door or being dragged back to the children's house." 11

It is not just recent dreams of collectivism that are subverted by kin soli¬
darity. The journalist Ferdinand Mount has documented that the family has
been a subversive institution throughout history. Family ties cut across the
bonds connecting comrades and brethren and thus are a nuisance to govern¬
ments, cults, gangs, revolutionary movements, and established religions. But
even a thinker as sympathetic to human nature as Noam Chomsky does not
acknowledge that people feel differently about their children from how they
feel about acquaintances and strangers. Here is an excerpt of an interview with
the lead guitarist of the rap metal group Rage Against the Machine:

rage: Another unquestionable idea is that people are naturally com¬
petitive, and that therefore, capitalism is the only proper way to or¬
ganize society. Do you agree?

chomsky: Look around you. In a family for example, if the parents are
hungry do they steal food from the children? They would if they
were competitive. In most social groupings that are even semi-sane
people support each other and are sympathetic and helpful and care
about other people and so on. Those are normal human emotions.

It takes plenty of training to drive those feelings out of people's
heads, and they show up all over the place. 12

246/ Know Thyself

Unless people treat other members of society the way they treat their own chil¬
dren, the answer is a non sequitur: people could care deeply about their chil¬
dren but feel differently about the millions of other people who make up
society. The very framing ofthe question and answer assumes that humans are
competitive or sympathetic across the board, rather than having different
emotions toward people with whom they have different genetic relationships.

Chomsky implies that people are born with fraternal feelings toward their
social groups and that the feelings are driven out of their heads by training.
But it seems to be the other way around. Throughout history, when leaders
have tried to unite a social group they have trained their members to think of
it as a family and to redirect their familial emotions inside it. 13 The names used
by groups that strive for solidarity-brethren, brotherhoods, fraternal organ¬
izations, sisterhood, sororities, crime families, the family ofman-concede in
their metaphors that kinship is the paradigm to which they aspire. (No society
tries to strengthen the family by likening it to a trade union, political party, or
church group.) The tactic is provably effective. Several experiments have
shown that people are more convinced by a political speech if the speaker ap¬
peals to their hearts and minds with kinship metaphors. 14

Verbal metaphors are one way to nudge people to treat acquaintances like
family, but usually stronger tactics are needed. In his ethnographic survey,
Alan Fiske showed that the ethos of Communal Sharing (one of his four uni¬
versal social relations) arises spontaneously among the members of a family
but is extended to other groups only with the help of elaborate customs and
ideologies.1” Unrelated people who want to share like a family create mytholo¬
gies about a common flesh and blood, a shared ancestry, and a mystical bond
to a territory (tellingly called a natal land, fatherland, motherland, or mother
country). They reinforce the myths with sacramental meals, blood sacrifices,
and repetitive rituals, which submerge the self into the group and create an
impression of a single organism rather than a federation of individuals. Their
religions speak of possession by spirits and other kinds of mind melds, which,
according to Fiske, "suggest that people may often want to have more intense
or pure Communal Sharing relationships than they are able to realize with or¬
dinary human beings."16 The dark side of this cohesion is groupthink, a cult
mentality, and myths of racial purity-the sense that outsiders are contami¬
nants who pollute the sanctity ofthe group.

None of this means that nonrelatives are ruthlessly competitive toward
one another, only that they are not as spontaneously cooperative as kin. And
ironically, for all this talk of solidarity and sympathy and common blood, we
shall soon see that families are not such harmonious units either.

TOLSTOY'S FAMOUS REMARK .that happy families are all alike but every
unhappy family is unhappy in its own way is not true at the level of ultimate

The Many Roots of out Suffering / 247

(evolutionary) causation. Trivers showed how the seeds of unhappiness in
every family have the same underlying source, i? Though relatives have com¬
mon interests because of their common genes, the degree of overlap is not
identical within all the permutations and combinations of family members.
Parents are related to all of their offspring by an equal factor, 50 percent, but
each child is related to himself or herself by a factor of 100 percent. And that
has a subtle but profound implication for the currency of family life, parents'
investment in their children.

Parental investment is a limited resource. A day has only twenty-four
hours, short-term memory can hold only four chunks of information, and, as
many a frazzled mother has pointed out, “I only have two hands!" At one end
of the lifespan, children learn that a mother cannot pump out an unlimited
stream of milk; at the other, they learn that parents do not leave behind infi¬
nite inheritances.

To the extent that emotions among people reflect their typical genetic re¬
latedness, Trivers argued, the members of a family should disagree on how
parental investment should be divvied up. Parents should want to split their
investment equitably among the children-if not in absolutely equal parts,
then according to each child's ability to prosper from the investment. But each
child should to want the parent to dole out twice as much ofthe investment to
himself or herself as to a sibling, because children share half their genes with
each full sibling but share all their genes with themselves. Given a family with
two children and one pie, each child should want to split it in a ratio of two-
thirds to one-third, while parents should want it to be split fifty-fifty. The re¬
sult is that no distribution will make everyone happy. Of course, it's not that
parents and children literally fight over pie or milk or inheritances (though
they may), and they certainly don't fight over genes. In our evolutionary his¬
tory, parental investment' affected a child's survival, which affected the proba¬
bility that the genes for various familial emotions in parents and in children
would have been passed on to us today. The prediction is that family members'
expectations of one another are not perfectly in sync.

Parent-offspring conflict and its obverse, sibling-sibling conflict, can be
seen throughout the animal kingdom." Littermates of nestmates fight among
themselves, sometimes lethally, and fight with their mothers over access to
milk, food, and care. (As Woody Allen's character in An tZ pointed out, "When
you're the middle child in a family of five million, you don't get much atten¬
tion.") The conflict also plays out in the physiology of prenatal human devel¬
opment. Fetuses tap their mothers' bloodstreams to mine the most nutrients
possible from her body, while the mother's body resists to keep it in good
shape for future children'. 19 And it continues to play itself out after birth. Until
recently, in most cultures, mothers who had poor prospects for sustaining a

248/Know Thyself

newborn to maturity cut their losses and abandoned it to die. 20 The fat cheeks
and precocious responsiveness in a baby's face may be an advertisement of
health designed to tilt the decision in its favor."

But the most interesting conflicts are the psychological ones, played out in
family dramas. Trivers touted the liberatory nature of sociobiology by invok¬
ing an "underlying symmetry in our social relationships" and "submerged ac¬
tors in the social world:'22 He was referring to women, as we will see in the
chapter on gender, and to children. The theory of parent-offspring conflict
says that families do not contain all-powerful, all-knowing parents and their
passive, grateful children. Natural selection should have equipped children
with psychological tactics allowing them to hold their own in a struggle with
their parents, with neither party having a permanent upper hand. Parents have
a short-lived advantage in sheer brawn, but children can fight back by being
cute, whining, throwing tantrums, pulling guilt trips, tormenting their sib¬
lings, getting between their parents, and holding themselves hostage with the
threat of self-destructive behavior," As they say,insanity is hereditary: you get
it from your children.

Most profoundly, children do not allow their personalities to be shaped by
their parents' nagging, blandishments, or attempts to serve as role models." As
we shall see in the chapter on children, the effect ofbeing raised by a given pair
of parents within a culture is surprisingly small: children who grow up in the
same home end up no more alike in personality than children who were sepa¬
rated at birth; adopted siblings grow up to be no more similar than strangers.
The findings flatly contradict the predictions of every theory in the history of
psychology but one. Trivers alone had predicted:

The offspring cannot rely on its parents for disinterested guidance. One
expects the offspring to be preprogrammed to resist some parental ma¬
nipulation while being open to other forms. When the parent imposes
an arbitrary system of reinforcement (punishment and reward) in order
to manipulate the offspring to act against its own best interests, selection
will favor offspring that resist such schedules of reinforcement."

That children don't turn out the way their parents want is, for many people,
one of the bittersweet lessons of parenthood. "Your children are not your chil¬
dren;' wrote the poet Kahlil Gibran. “You may give them your love but not
your thoughts, for they have their own thoughts.I"

The most obvious prediction of the theory of parent-offspring conflict is
that parents and siblings should all have different perceptions of how the par¬
ents treated the siblings. Indeed, studies of the grown members of families
show that most parents claim they treated their children equitably, while a

The Many Roots of Our Suffering /249

majority of siblings claim they did not get their fair share." Researchers call it
the Smothers Brothers effect, after the comedy pair whose duller member had
the signature line “Mom always liked you best."

But the logic of parent-offspring conflict does not apply only to contem¬
poraneous siblings. Offspring of any age tacitly compete against the unborn
descendants that parents might have if they were ceded the time and energy.
Since men can always father children (especially in the polygynous systems that
until recently characterized most societies), and since both sexes can lavish in¬
vestment on grandchildren, potential conflicts of interest between parents and
offspring hang over them for life. When parents arrange a marriage, they may
cut a deal that sacrifices a child's interest for future considerations benefiting a
sibling or the father. Children and adults may hold different opinions on
whether a child should stick around to help the family or strike out on his or
her own reproductive career. Married children have to decide how to allocate
time and energy between the nuclear family they have created and the extended
family they were born into. Parents have to decide whether to distribute their
resources in equal parts or to the child who can make the best use of them.

The logic of parent-offspring and sibling-sibling conflict casts a new light
on the doctrine of "family values" that is prominent in the contemporary reli¬
gious and cultural right. According to this doctrine, the family is a haven of
nurturance and benevolence, allowing parents to convey values to children
that best serve their interests. Modern cultural forces, by allowing women to
spend less time with young children and by expanding the world of older chil¬
dren beyond the family circle, have supposedly thrown a grenade into this
nest, harming children and society alike. Part of this theory is surely accurate;
parents and other relatives have a stronger interest in the well-being of a child
than any third party does. But parent-offspring conflict implies that there is
more to the .picture.

If one could ask young children what they want, it would undoubtedly be
the undivided attention of their mothers twenty-four hours a day. But that
does not mean that nonstop mothering is the biological norm. The need to
find a balance between investing in an offspring and staying healthy (ulti¬
mately to invest in other offspring) is inherent to all living things. Human
mothers are no exception, and often have to resist the demands of their pint-
sized tyrants so as not to compromise their own survival and the survival of
their other born and unborn children. The anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy
has shown that the tradeoffbetween working and mothering was not invented
by power-suited Yuppies of the 1980s. Women in foraging societies use a vari¬
ety of arrangements to raise their children without starving in the process, in¬
cluding seeking status within' the group (which improves the children's
well-being) and sharing childcare duties with other women in the band. Fa¬
thers, of course, are usually the main providers other than the mother herself.

250/Know Thyself

but they have bad habits like dying, deserting, and not making a living, and
mothers have never .depended on them alone."

The weakening of parents' hold over their older children is also not just a
recent ’casualty of destructive forces. It is part of a long-running expansion of
freedom in the West that has granted children their always-present desire for
more autonomy than parents are willing to cede. In traditional societies, chil¬
dren were shackled to the family's land, betrothed in arranged marriages, and
under the thumb of the family patriarch." That began to change in medieval
Europe, and some historians argue it was the first steppingstone in the exten¬
sion of rights that we associate with the Enlightenment and that culminated in
the abolition of feudalism and slavery." Today it is no doubt true that some
children are led astray by a bad crowd or popular culture. But some children are
rescued from abusive or manipulative families by peers, neighbors, and teach¬
ers. Many children have profited from laws, such as compulsory schooling and
the ban on forced marriages, that may override the preferences oftheir parents.
Some may profit from information,, such as about contraception or careers, that
their parents try to withhold. And some must escape a stifling cultural ghetto to
discover the cosmopolitan delights of the modern world. Isaac Bashevis
Singer's novel Shosha begins with a reminiscence oftheprotagonist's childhood
in the Jewish section ofWarsaw at the beginning of the twentieth century:

I was brought up on three dead languages-Hebrew, Aramaic, and Yid¬
dish ... -and in a culture that developed in Babylon: the Talmud. The
cheder [schoolroom] where I studied was a room in which the teacher
ate and slept, and his wife cooked. There I studied not arithmetic, geog¬
raphy, physics, chemistry, or history, but the laws governing an egg laid
on a holiday and sacrifices in a temple destroyed two thousand years
ago. Although my ancestors had settled in Poland some six or seven
hundred years before I was born, I knew only a few words of the Polish
language_I was an anachronism in everyway, but I didn't know it.

Singer's reminiscence is more nostalgic than bitter, and of course most fami¬
lies offer far more nurturance than repression or strife. At the proximate level.
Tolstoy was surely right that there are happy and unhappy families and that
unhappy families are unhappy in different ways, depending on the chemistry
of the people thrown together by genetics and fate. The conflict inherent to
families does not make family ties any less central to human existence. It only
implies that the balancing of competing interests that governs all human in¬
teractions does not end at the door of the family home.

AMONG the COMBINATIONS of people that Trivers considered is the pair
consisting of a man and a woman. The logic oftheir relationship is rooted in

The Many Roots of Our Suffering / 251

the most fundamental difference between the sexes: not their chromosomes)
not their plumbing) but their parental investment.'! In mammals) the minimal
parental investments of a male and a female differ dramatically. A male can get
away with a few minutes of copulation and a tablespoon of semen) but a fe¬
male carries an offspring for months inside her body and nourishes it before
and after it is born. As they say of the respective contributions of the chicken
and the pig to eggs and bacon) the first is involved) but the second is commit¬
ted. Since it takes one member of each sex to make a baby) access to females is
the limiting resource for males in reproduction. For a male to maximize the
number of his descendants) he should mate with as many females as possible;
for a female to maximize the number of her descendants) she should mate
with the best-quality male available. This explains the two widespread sex dif¬
ferences in many species in the animal kingdom: males compete) females
choose; males seek quantity) females quality.

Humans are mammals) and our sexual behavior is consistent with our Lin-
naean class. Donald Symons sums up the ethnographic record on sex differ¬
ences in sexuality: "Among all peoples it is primarily men who court) woo)
proposition) seduce) employ love charms and love magic) give gifts in exchange
for sex)and use the services of prostitutes.T? Among Western peoples) studies
have shown that men seek a greater number of sexual partners than women)
are less picky in their choice of a short-term partner) and are far more likely to
be customers for visual pornography." But the male of Homo sapiens differs
from the male of most other mammals in a crucial way: men invest in their off¬
spring rather than leaving all the investing to the female. Though deprived of
organs that can siphon nutrients directly into his children) a man can help
them indirectly by feeding) protecting) teaching) and nurturing them. The
minimum investments of a man and a woman are still unequal) because a child
can be born to a single mother whose husband has fled but not to a single fa¬
ther whose wife has fled. But the investment of the man is greater than zero)
which means that women are also predicted to compete in the mate market)
though they should compete over the males most likely to invest (and the males
with the highest genetic quality) rather than the males most willing to mate.

The genetic economics of sex also predicts that both sexes have a genetic
incentive to commit adultery) though for partly different reasons. A philan¬
dering man can have additional offspring by impregnating women other than
his wife. A philandering woman can have better offspring by conceiving a
child by a man with better genes than her husband while having her husband
around to help nurture the child. But when a wife gets the best of both worlds
from her affair) the husband gets the worst of both worlds) because he is in¬
vesting in another man's genes that have usurped the place of his own. We thus
get the flip side of the evolution of fatherly feelings: the evolution of male sex¬
ual jealousy) designed to prevent his wife from having another man's child.

252 / Know Thyself

Women's jealousy is tilted more toward preventing the alienation of a man's
affections, a sign of his willingness to invest in another woman's children at the
expense of her own. 34

The biological tragedy of the sexes is that the genetic interests of a man
and a woman can be so close that they almost count as a single organism, but
the possibilities for their interests to diverge are never far away. The biologist
Richard Alexander points out that if a couple marry for life, are perfectly
monogamous, .and favor their nuclear family above each spouse's extended
family, their genetic interests are identical, tied up in the single basket con¬
taining their children.P Under that idealization, the love between a man and a
woman should be the strongest emotional bond, in the living world-"two
hearts beating as one"-and of course for some lucky couples it is. Unfortu¬
nately, the ifs in the deduction are big ifs. The power of nepotism means that
spouses, are always being tugged apart by in-laws and, if there are any, by
stepchildren. And the incentives of adultery mean that spouses can always be
tugged apart by cuckolds and home-wreckers. It is no surprise to an evolu¬
tionary biologist that infidelity, stepchildren, and in-laws are among the main
causes of marital strife.

Nor is it a surprise that the act of love itself should be fraught with con¬
flict. Sex is the most concentrated source of physical pleasure granted by our
nervous system, so why is it such an emotional bramble bush? In all societies,
sex is at least somewhat "dirty." It is conducted in private, pondered obses¬
sively, regulated by custom and taboo, the subject of gossip and teasing, and a
trigger for jealous rage." For a brief period in the 1960s and 1970s people
dreamed of an erotopiain which men and women could engage in sex without
hang-ups and inhibitions. The protagonist of Erica long's Fear of Flying fanta¬
sized about "the zipless fuck": anonymous, casual, and free of guilt and jeal¬
ousy. "If you can't be with the one you love, love the one you're with:' sang
Stephen Stills. "Ifyou love somebody, set them free," sang Sting.

But Sting also sang, "Every move you make, I'll be watching you." And
Isadora Wing concluded that fastener-free copulation is "rarer than the uni¬
corn." Even in a time when seemingly anything goes, most people do not par¬
take in sex as casually as they partake in food or conversation. That includes
today's college campuses, which are reportedly hotbeds of the brief sexual en¬
counters known as "hooking up." The psychologist Elizabeth Paul sums up her
research on the phenomenon: "Casual sex is not casual. Very few people are
coming out unscathed."? The reasons are as deep as anything in biology. One
of the hazards of sex is a baby, and a baby is not just any seven-pound object
but, from an evolutionary point of view, our reason for being. Every time a
woman has sex with a man she is taking a chance at sentencing herself to years
of motherhood, with the additional gamble that the whims of her partner
could make it single motherhood. She is committing a chunk of her finite

The Many Roots of Our Suffering / 253

reproductive output to the genes and intentions of that man, forgoing the
opportunity to use it with some other man who may have better endowments
of either or both. The man, for his part, may be either implicitly committing
his sweat and toil to the incipient child or deceiving his partner about such in¬
tentions.

And that covers only the immediate participants. As long lamented else¬
where, there are never just two people in bed. They are always accompanied in
their minds by parents, former lovers, and real and imagined rivals. In other
words, third parties have an interest in the possible outcome of a sexual liai¬
son. The romantic rivals of the man or woman, who are being cuckolded or
rendered celibate or bereft by their act of love, have reasons to want to be in
their places. The interests of third parties help us understand why sex is almost
universally conducted in private. Symons points out that because a man’s re¬
productive success is strictly limited by his access to women, in the minds of
men sex is always a rare commodity. People may have sex in private for the
same reason that people during a famine eat in private: to avoid inciting dan¬
gerous envy as

As if the bed weren't crowded enough, every child of a man and a woman
is also the grandchild of two other men and two other women. Parents take an
interest in their children's reproduction because in the long run it is their re¬
production too. Worse, the preciousness of female reproductive capacity
makes it a valuable resource for the men who control her in traditional patri¬
archal societies, namely her father and brothers. They can trade a daughter or
sister for additional wives or resources for themselves, and thus they have an in¬
terest in protecting their investment by keeping her from becoming pregnant
by men other than the ones they want to sell her to. It is not just the husband
or boyfriend who takes a proprietary interest in a woman's sexual activity, then,
but also her father and brothers." Westerners were horrified by the treatment
of women under the regime of the Taliban in Afghanistan from 1995 to 2001,
when women were cloaked in burqas and forbidden to work, attend school,
and leave their homes unaccompanied. Wilson and Daly have shown that laws
and customs with the same intent-giving men control over their wives' and
daughters' sexuality-have been common throughout history and in many so¬
cieties, including our own." Many a father of a teenage girl has had the fleet¬
ing thought that the burqa is not such a bad idea after all.

On strictly rational grounds, the volatility of sex is a paradox, because in
an era with contraception and women's rights these archaic entanglements
should have no claim on our feelings. We should be ziplessly loving the one
we're with, and sex should inspire no more gossip, music, fiction, raunchy
humor, or strong emotions than eating or talking does. The fact that people
are tormented by the Darwinian economics of babies they are no longer hav¬
ing is testimony to the long reach of human nature.

254/Know Thyself

what about people who are not tied by blood or children? No one doubts
that human beings make sacrifices for people who are unrelated to them. But
they could do so in two different ways.

Humans, like ants, could have a gung-ho superorganism thing that
prompts them to do everything for the colony. The idea that people are in¬
stinctively communal is an important precept of the romantic doctrine of the
Noble Savage.lt figured in the theory of Engels and Marx that "primitive com¬
munism" was the first social system, in the anarchism of Peter Kropotkin (who
wrote, “The ants and termites have renounced the 'Hobbesian war: and they
are the better for it”), in the family-of-man utopianism of the 1960s, and in the
writings of contemporary radical scientists such as Lewontin and Chomsky."
Some radical scientists imagine that the only alternative is an Ayn Randian in¬
dividualism in which every man is an island. Steven Rose and the sociologist
Hilary Rose, for instance, call evolutionary psychology a "right-wing libertar¬
ian attack on collectivity."42 But the accusation is factually incorrect-as we
shall see in the chapter on politics, many evolutionary psychologists are on the
political left-and it is conceptually incorrect. The real alternative to romantic
collectivism is not "right-wing libertarianism" but a recognition that social
generosity comes from a complex suite of thoughts and emotions rooted in
the logic of reciprocity. That gives it a very different psychology from the com¬
munal sharing practiced by social insects, human families, and cults that try to
pretend they are families."

Trivers built on arguments by Williams and Hamilton that pure, public-
minded altruism-s-a desire to benefit the group or species at the expense of the
self-is unlikely to evolve among nonrelatives, because it is vulnerable to inva¬
sion by cheaters who prosper by enjoying the good deeds of others without
contributing in turn. But as I mentioned, Trivers also showed that a measured
reciprocal altruism can evolve.Reciprocators who help others who have helped
them, and who shun or punish others who have failed to help them, will enjoy
the benefits of gains in trade and outcompete individualists, cheaters, and pure
altruists.r' Humans are well equipped for the demands of reciprocal altruism.
They remember each other as individuals (perhaps with the help of dedicated
regions of the brain), and have an eagle eye and a flypaper memory for
cheaters.P They feel moralistic emotions-liking, sympathy, gratitude, guilt,
shame, and anger-that are uncanny implementations of the strategies for re¬
ciprocal altruism in computer simulations and mathematical models. Experi¬
ments have confirmed the prediction that people are most inclined to help a
stranger when they can do so at low cost, when the stranger is in need, and
when the stranger is in a position to reciprocate." They like people who grant
them favors, grant favors to those they like, feel guilty when they have withheld
a possible favor, and punish those who withhold favors from them."

The Many Roots of Our Suffering / 255

An ethos of reciprocity can pilot not just one-on-one exchanges but con¬
tributions to the public good, such as hunting animals that are too large for the
hunter to eat himself, building a lighthouse that keeps everyone's ships off
the rocks, or banding together to invade neighbors or to repel their invasions.
The inherent problem with public goods is captured in Aesop's fable "Who
Will Bell the Cat?" The mice in a household agree they would be better offif
the cat had a bell around its neck to warn them of its approach, but no mouse
will risk life and limb to attach the bell. A willingness to bell the cat-that is, to
contribute to the public good-can nonetheless evolve, if it is accompanied by
a willingness to reward those who shoulder the burden or to punish the
cheaters who shirk it. 48

The tragedy of reciprocal altruism is that sacrifices on behalf of nonrela¬
tives cannot survive without a web of disagreeable emotions like anxiety, mis¬
trust, guilt, shame, and anger. As the journalist Matt Ridley puts it in his survey
of the evolution of cooperation:

Reciprocity hangs, like a sword of Damocles, over every human head.

He's only asking me to his party so I'll give his book a good review.
They’ve been to dinner twice and never asked us back once. After all I
did for him, how could he do that to me? If you do this for me, I prom¬
ise I'll make it up later. What did I do to deserve that? You owe it to me.
Obligation; debt; favour; bargain; contract; exchange; deal. ... Our lan¬
guage and our lives are permeated with ideas of reciprocity.!?

Studies of altruism by behavioral economists have thrown a spotlight on
this sword of Damocles by showing that people are neither the amoral egoists
of classical economic theory nor the all-for-one-and-one-for-all communal-
ists of utopian fantasies. In the Ultimatum Game, for example, one participant
gets a large sum of money to divide between himself and another participant,
and the second one can take it or leave it. If he leaves it, neither side gets any¬
thing. A selfish proposer would keep the lion’s share; a selfish respondent
would accept the remaining crumbs, no matter how small, because part of a
loaf is better than none. In reality the proposer tends to offer almost halfofthe
total sum, and the respondent doesn’t settle for much less than half, even
though turning down a smaller share is an act of spite that deprives both par¬
ticipants. The respondent seems to be driven by a sense ofrighteous anger and
punishes a selfish proposer accordingly; the proposer anticipates this and
makes an offer that is just generous enough to be accepted. We know that the
proposer's generosity is driven by the fear of a spiteful response because of the
outcome of two variants of the experiment. In the Dictator game, the proposer
simply divides the sum between the two players and there is nothing the re¬
spondent can do about it. With no fear of reprisal, the proposer makes a far

256/ Know Thyself

stingier offer. The offer still tends to be more generous than it has to be, be¬
cause the proposer worries about getting a reputation for stinginess that could
come back to bite him in the long run. We know this because of the outcome
of the Double-Blind Dictator game, where proposals from many players are
sealed and neither the respondent nor the experimenter knows who offered
how much. In this variant, generosity plummets; a majority of the proposers
keep everything for themselves.50

And then there is the Public Good game, in which everyone makes a vol¬
untary contribution to a common pot of money, the experimenter doubles it,
and the pot is divided evenly among the participants regardless of what they
contributed. The optimal strategy for each player acting individually is to be a
free rider and contribute nothing, hoping that others will contribute some¬
thing and he can get a share of their contribution. Of course, if every player
thinks that way, the pot stays empty and no one earns a dime. The optimum
for the group is for all the players to contribute everything they have so they
can all double their money. When the game is played repeatedly, however,
everyone tries to become a free rider, and the pot dwindles to a self-defeating
zero. On the other hand, if people are allowed both to contribute to the pot
and to levy fines on those who don't contribute, conscience doth make cow¬
ards of them all, and almost everyone contributes to the common good,
allowing everyone to make a profit. 51 The same phenomenon has been inde¬
pendently documented by social psychologists, who call it "social loafing."
When people are part of a group, they pull less hard on a rope, clap less en¬
thusiastically, and think up fewer ideas in a brainstorming session-unless
they think their contributions to the group effort are being monitored.52

These experiments may be artificial, but the motives they expose played
themselves out in the real-life experiments known as utopian communities. In
the nineteenth century and early decades of the twentieth, self-contained
communes based on a philosophy of communal sharing sprang up through¬
out the United States. All of them collapsed from internal tensions, the ones
guided by socialist ideology after a median of two years, the ones guided by
religious ideology after a median of twenty years.53 The Israeli kibbutzim,
originally galvanized by socialism and Zionism, steadily dismantled their col¬
lectivist philosophy over the decades. It was undermined by their members'
desire to live with their families, to own their own clothing, and to keep small
luxuries or sums of money acquired outside the kibbutz. And the kibbutzim
were dragged down by inefficiencies because of the free-rider problem-they
were, in the words of one kibbutznik, a «paradise for parasites."54

In other cultures, too, generosity is doled out according to a complex
mental calculus. Remember Fiske's ethnographic survey, which shows that
the ethic of Communal Sharing arises spontaneously mainly within families
(and on circumscribed occasions such as feasts). Equality Matching-that is.

The Many Roots of Our Suffering / 257

reciprocal altruism-is the norm for everyday interactions among more dis¬
tant relatives and nonrelatives." A possible exception is the distribution of
meat by bands of foragers, who pool the risks of hunting large game (with its
big but unpredictable windfalls) by sharing their catch. 56 Even here, the ethic
is far from unstinting generosity, and the sharing is described as having "an
edge of hostility'"? Hunters generally have no easy way of keeping their catch
from others, so they don't so much share their catch as stand by while others
confiscate it. Their hunting effort is treated as a public good, and they are pun¬
ished by gossip and ostracism if they resist the confiscation, are rewarded by
prestige (which earns them sexual partners) if they tolerate it, and may be en¬
titled to payback when the tables turn. A similar psychology may be found
among the last hunter-gatherers in our own culture, commercial fishermen. In
The Perfect Storm, Sebastian Junger writes:

Sword[ fish | boat captains help each other out on the high seas whenever
they can; they lend engine parts, offer technical advice, donate food or
fuel. The competition between a dozen boats rushing a perishable com¬
modity to market fortunately doesn't kill an inherent sense of concern
for each other. This may seem terrifically noble, but it’s not-or at least
not entirely. It’s also self-interested. Each captain knows that he may be
the next one with the frozen injector or the leaking hydraulics/"

Beginning with Ashley Montagu in 1952, thinkers with collectivist sympa¬
thies have tried to eke out a place for unmeasured generosity by invoking group
selection, a Darwinian competition among groups of organisms rather than
among individual organisms/" The hope is that groups whose members sacri¬
fice their interests for the common good will outcompete those in which every
man is for himself, and as a result generous impulses will come to prevail in the
species. Williams dashed the dream in 1966 when he pointed out that unless a
group is genetically fixed and hermetically sealed, mutants or immigrants con¬
stantly infiltrate it.6o A selfish infiltrator would soon take over the group with
its descendants, who are more numerous because they have reaped theadvan-
tages of others' sacrifices without making their own. This would happen long
before the group could parlay its internal cohesion into victory over neighbor¬
ing groups and bud off new offspring groups to repeat the process.

The term "group selection" survives in evolutionary biology, but usually
with different meanings from the one Montagu had in mind. Groups were cer¬
tainly part of our evolutionary environment, and our ancestors evolved traits,
such as a concern with one's reputation, that led them to prosper in groups.
Sometimes the interests of an individual and the interests of a group can coin¬
cide; for example, both do better when the group is not exterminated by ene¬
mies. Some theorists invoke group selection to explain a willingness to punish

25 8/Know Thyself

free riders who do not contribute to the public good." The biologist David
Sloan Wilson and the philosopher Elliot Sober recently redefined "group" as a
set of mutual reciprocators, providing an alternative language in which to de¬
scribe Trivers's theory but not an alternative to the theory itself/” But no one
believes the original idea that selection among groups led to the evolution of
unstinting self-sacrifice. Even putting aside the theoretical difficulties ex¬
plained by Williams, we know empirically that people in all cultures do things
that lead them to prosper at the expense of their group, such as lying, compet¬
ing for mates, having affairs, getting jealous, and fighting for dominance.

Group selection, in any case, does not deserve its feel-good reputation.
Whether or not it endowed us with generosity toward the members of our
group, it would certainly have endowed us with a hatred of the members of
othergroups, because it favors whatever traits lead one group to prevail over its
rivals. (Recall that group selection was the version of Darwinism that got
twisted into Nazism.) This does not mean that group selection is incorrect,
only that subscribing to a scientific theory for its apparent political payabil¬
ity can backfire. As Williams put it, "To claim that [natural selection at the level
of competing groups] is morally superior to natural selection at the level of
competing individuals would imply, in its human application, that systematic
genocide is morally superior to random murder."63

PEOPLE DO MORE for their fellows than return favors and punish cheaters.
They often perform generous acts without the slightest hope for payback,
ranging from leaving a tip in a restaurant they will never visit again to throw¬
ing themselves on a live grenade to save their brothers in arms. Trivers, to¬
gether with the economists Robert Frank and Jack Hirshleifer, has pointed out
that pure magnanimity can evolve in an environment of people seeking to dis¬
criminate fair-weather friends from loyal allies.” Signs ofheartfelt loyalty and
generosity serve as guarantors of one's promises, reducing a partner's worry
that you will default on them. The best way to convince a skeptic that you are
trustworthy and generous is to /^trustworthy and generous.

Of course, such virtue cannot be the dominant mode of human interac¬
tion or else we could dispense with the gargantuan apparatus designed to keep
exchanges fair-money, cash registers, banks, accounting firms, billing de¬
partments, courts-and base our economy on the honor system. At the other
extreme, people also commit acts of outright treachery, including larceny,
fraud, extortion, murder, and other ways of taking a benefit at someone else's
expense. Psychopaths, who lack all traces of a conscience, are the most extreme
example, but social psychologists have documented what they call Machiavel¬
lian traits in many individuals who fall short of outright psychopathy/" Most
people, of course, are in the middle of the range, displaying mixtures of reci¬
procity, pure generosity, and greed.

The Many Roots of Our Suffering / 259

Why do people range across such a wide spectrum? Perhaps all of us are
capable of being saints or sinners, depending on the temptations and threats
at hand. Perhaps we are set on one of these paths early in life by our upbring¬
ing or by the mores of our peer group. Perhaps we choose these paths early in
life because we are endowed with a deck of conditional strategies on how to
develop a personality: if you discover that you are attractive and charming, try
being a manipulator; if you are large and commanding, try being a bully; if
you are surrounded by generous people, be generous in kind; and so on. Per¬
haps we are predisposed to being nastier or nicer by our genes. Perhaps human
development is a lottery, and fate assigns us a personality at random. Most
likely, our differences come from several of these forces or from hybrids
among them. For example, we may all develop a sense of generosity if enough
of our friends and neighbors are generous, but the threshold or the multiplier
of that function may differ among us genetically or at random: some people
need only a few nice neighbors to grow up nice, others need a majority.

Genes are certainly a factor. Conscientiousness, agreeableness, neuroti-
cism, psychopathy, and criminal behavior are substantially (though by no
means completely) heritable, and altruism may be as well." But this only re¬
places the original question-Why do people vary in their selfishness?-with
another one. Natural selection tends to make the members of a species alike in
their adaptive traits, because whichever version of a trait is better than the oth¬
ers will be selected and the alternative.versions will die out. That is why most
evolutionary psychologists attribute systematic differences among people to
their environments and attribute only random differences to the genes. This ge¬
netic noise can come from at least two sources. Inside the genome, rust never
sleeps: random mutations constantly creep in and are only slowly and unevenly
eliminated by selection." And selection can favor molecular variability for its
own sake to keep us one step ahead of the parasites that constantly evolve to in¬
filtrate ourcellsand tissues. Differences in the functioning ofwhole bodies and
brains could be a by-product of this churning of protein sequences/"

But the theory of reciprocal altruism raises another possibility: that some
of the genetic differences among people in their social emotions are system¬
atic. One exception to the rule that selection reduces variability arises when
the best strategy depends on what of/terorganisms are doing. The child's game
of scissors-paper-rock is one analogy, and another may be found in the deci¬
sion of which route to take to work. As commuters begin to avoid a congested
highway and opt for a less traveled route, the new one will no longer be less
traveled, so many will choose the first one, until congestion builds up there,
which will induce still other commuters to choose the second route, and so on.
The commuters will eventually distribute themselves in some ratio between
the two roads. The same thing can happen in evolution, where it is called
frequency-dependent selection.

260/Know Thyself

One corollary of reciprocal altruism, shown in a number of simulations,
is that frequency-dependent selection can produce temporary or permanent
mixtures of strategies. For example, even if reciprocators predominate in a
population, a minority of cheaters can sometimes survive, taking advantage of
the generosity of the reciprocators as long as they don't grow so numerous as
to meet other cheaters too often or to be recognized and punished by the re¬
ciprocators. Whether the population ends up homogeneous or with a mixture
of strategies depends on which strategies are competing, which start off more
numerous, how easily they enter and leave the population, and the payoffs for
cooperation and defection."

We have an intriguing parallel. In the real world, people differ genetically
in their selfish tendencies. And in models of the evolution of altruism, actors
may evolve differences in their selfish tendencies. It could be a coincidence, but
it probably is not. Several biologists have adduced evidence that psychopathy
is a cheating strategy that evolved by frequency-dependent selection." Statis¬
tical analyses show that a psychopath, rather than merely falling at the end of
a continuum for one or two traits, has a distinct cluster of traits (superficial
charm, impulsivity, irresponsibility, callousness, guiltlessness, mendacity, and
exploitiveness) that sets him off from the rest of the population." And many
psychopaths show none of the subtle physical abnormalities produced by bio¬
logical noise, suggesting that psychopathy is not always a biological mistake."
The psychologist Linda Mealey has argued that frequency-dependent selec¬
tion has produced at least two kinds of psychopaths. One kind consists of peo¬
ple who are genetically predisposed to psychopathy regardless of how they
grow up. The other kind is made up of people who are predisposed to psy¬
chopathy only in certain circumstances, namely when they perceive them¬
selves to be competitively disadvantaged in society and find themselves at
home in a group of other antisocial peers.

The possibility that some individuals are born with a weak conscience
runs squarely against the doctrine of the Noble Savage. It calls to mind the old-
fashioned notions of born criminals and bad seeds, and it was blotted out by
twentieth-century intellectuals and replaced, with the belief that all wrong¬
doers are victims of poverty or bad parenting. In the late 1970s Norman
Mailer received a letter from a prisoner named Jack Henry Abbott, who had
spent most of his life behind bars for crimes ranging from passing bad checks
to killing a fellow prisoner. Mailer was writing a book about the murderer
Gary Gilmore, and Abbott offered to help him get into the mindset of a killer
by sharing his prison diaries and his radical critique of the criminal justice
system. Mailer was dazzled by Abbott's prose and proclaimed him to be a bril¬
liant new writer and thinker-"an intellectual, a radical, a potential leader, a
man obsessed with a vision of more elevated human relations in abetter world
that revolution could forge." He arranged for Abbott's letters to be published

The Many Roots of ouf Suffering / 261

in the New York Review of Books and then as a 1980 book. In the Belly of the
Beast. Here is an excerpt, in which Abbott describes what it is like to stab some¬
one to death:

You can feel his life trembling through the knife in your hand. It almost
overcomes you, the gentleness of the feeling at the center of a coarse act
of murder_You go to the floor with him to finish him. It is like cut¬

ting hot butter, no resistance at all. They always whisper one thing at the
end: "Please."Youget the odd impression he is not imploring you not to
harm him, but to do it right.

Over the objections of prison psychiatrists who saw that Abbott had
psychopath written all over his face. Mailer and other New York literati
helped him win an early parole. Abbott was soon feted at literary dinners,
likened to Solzhenitsyn and Jacobo Timerman, and interviewed on Good
Morning America and in People magazine. Two weeks later he got into an ar¬
gument with an aspiring young playwright who was working as a waiter in a
restaurant and had asked Abbott not to use the employees' restroom. Abbott
asked him to step outside, stabbed him in the chest, and left him to bleed to
death on the sidewalk. 73

Psychopaths can be clever and charming, and Mailer was only the latest in
a series of intellectuals from all over the political spectrum who were conned
in the 1960s and 1970s. In 1973 William F. Buckley helped win the early release
of Edgar Smith, a man who had been convicted of molesting a fifteen-year-old
cheerleader and crushing her head with a rock. Smith won his freedom in ex¬
change for confessing to the crime, and then, as Buckley was interviewing him
on his national television program, he recanted the confession. Three years
later he was arrested for beating another young woman with a rock, and he is
now serving a life sentence for attempted murder."

Not everyone was conned. The comedian Richard Pryor described his ex¬
perience at the Arizona State Penitentiary during the filming of Stir Crazy:

It made my heart ache, you know, to see all these beautiful black men in
the joint. Goddam; the warriors should be out there helping the masses.

I felt that way, I was real naive. Six weeks I was up there and I talked to
the brothers. I talked to 'em, and ... [Looks around, frightened] ...
Thank God we got penitentiaries! I asked one, "Why did you kill every¬
body in the house?" He says, "They was home." ... I met one dude,
kidnap-mu rd ered four times. And I thought, three times, that was your
last, right? I says, "What happened?" [Answers in falsetto] "I can't get
this shit right! But I'm getting paroled in two years."

262/ Know Thyself

Pryor was not, of course, denying the inequities that continue to put dispro¬
portionate numbers of African Americans in prison. He was only contrasting
the common sense of ordinary people with the romanticism of intellectuals-a-
and perhaps exposing their condescending attitude that poor people can't be
expected to refrain from murder) and that they should not be alarmed by the
murderers in their midst.

The romantic notion that all malefactors are depraved on accounta
they're deprived has worn thin among experts and laypeople alike. Many psy¬
chopaths had difficult lives, of course, but that does not mean that having a
difficult life turns one into a psychopath. There is an old joke about two social
workers discussing a problematic child: "Johnny came from a broken home:'
"Yes, Johnny could break any home:' Machiavellian personalities can be found
in all social classes-there are kleptocrats, robber barons, military dictators,
and rogue financiers-and some psychopaths, such as the cannibal Jeffrey
Dahmer, have come from decent, upper-middle-class homes. And none ofthis
means that all people who resort to violence or crime are psychopaths, only
that some of the worst ones are.

Psychopaths, as far as we know, cannot be "cured." Indeed, the psycholo¬
gist Marnie Rice has shown that certain harebrained ideas for therapy, such as
boosting their self-esteem and teaching them social skills,can make them even,
more dangerous." But that does not mean there is nothing we can do about
them. For example, Mealey shows that of the two kinds of psychopaths she dis¬
tinguished, inveterate psychopaths are unmoved by programs that try to get
them to appreciate the harm they do, but they may be responsive to surer pun¬
ishments that induce them to behave more responsibly out of sheer self-
interest. Conditional psychopaths, on the other hand, may respond better to
social changes that prevent them from slipping through society's cracks.
Whether or not these are the best prescriptions) they are examples of how sci¬
ence and policy might come to grips with a problem that many intellectuals
tried to wish awayin the twentieth century but that has long been a concern of
religion, philosophy, and fiction: the existence-of evil.

ACCORDING TO TRIVERS, every human relationship-s-our ties to our par¬
ents, siblings, romantic partners, and friends and neighbors-has a distinct
psychology forged by a pattern of converging and diverging interests. What
about the relationship that is, according to the pop song, "the greatest love of
all"-the relationship with the self? In a pithy and now-famous passage,
Trivers wrote:

If... deceit is fundamental to animal communication, then there must

be strong selection to spot deception and this ought) in turn) to select for

The Many Roots of out Suffering / 263

a degree of self-deception, rendering some facts and motives uncon¬
scious so as not to betray-by the subtle signs of self-knowledge-the
deception being practiced. Thus, the conventional view that natural se¬
lection favors nervous systems which produce ever more accurate im¬
ages of the world must be a very narveviewof mental evolution. 76

The conventional view may be largely correct when it comes to the physical
world, which allows for reality checks by multiple observers and where mis¬
conceptions are likely to harm the perceiver. But as Trivers notes, it may not be
correct when it comes to the self, which one can access in a way that others
cannot and where misconceptions may be helpful. Sometimes parents may
want to convince a child that what they are doing is for the child's own good,
children may want to convince parents that they are needy rather than greedy,
lovers may want to convince each other that they will always be true, and un¬
related folks may want to convince one another that they are worthy coopera¬
tors. These opinions are often embellishments, if not tall tales, and to slip them
beneath a partner's radar a speaker should believe in them so as not to stam¬
mer, sweat, or trip himself up in contradictions. Ice-veined liars might, of
course, get away with telling bald fibs to strangers, but they would also have
trouble keeping friends, who could never take their promises seriously. The
price of looking credible is being unable to lie with a straight face, and that
means a part of the mind must be designed to believe its own propaganda-
while another part registers just enough truth to keep the self-concept in touch
with reality.

The theory of self-deception was foreshadowed by the sociologist Erving
Goffman in his 1959 book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, which dis¬
puted the romantic notion that behind the masks we show other people is the
one true self. No, said Goffman; it's masks all the way down. Many discoveries
in the ensuing decades have borne him out."

Though modern psychologists and psychiatrists tend to reject orthodox
Freudian theory, many acknowledge that Freud was right about the defense
mechanisms of the ego. Any therapist will tell you that people protest too
much, deny or repress unpleasant facts, project their flaws onto others, turn
their discomfort into abstract intellectual problems, distract themselves with
time-consuming activities, and rationalize away their motives. The psychia¬
trists Randolph Nesse and Alan Floyd have argued that these habits do not
safeguard the self against bizarre sexual wishes and fears (like having sex with
one's mother) but are tactics of self-deception: they suppress evidence that we
are not as beneficent or competent as we would like to think." As Jeff Gold¬
blum said in The Big Chill, "Rationalizations are more important than sex."
When his friends demurred, he asked, «Have you ever gone a week without a
rationalization?"

264/ Know Thyself

As we saw in Chapter 3, when a person suffers neurological damage, the
healthy parts of the brain engage in extraordinary confabulations to explain
away the foibles caused by the damaged parts (which are invisible to the self
because they are partofthe self) and to present the whole person as a capable,
rational actor. A patient who fails to experience a visceral click of recognition
when he sees his wife, but who acknowledges that she looks and acts just like
his wife, may deduce that an amazing impostor is living in his house. A patient
who believes she is at home and is shown the hospital elevator may say with¬
out missing a beat, "You wouldn't believe what it cost us to have that in¬
stalled,"?" After the Supreme Court justice William O. Douglas suffered a
stroke that left him paralyzed on one side and confined to a wheelchair, he
invited reporters on a hike and told them he wanted to tryout for the Wash¬
ington Redskins. He was soon forced to step down when he refused to ac¬
knowledge that anything was wrong with his judgment."

In social psychology experiments, people consistently overrate their own
skill, honesty, generosity, and autonomy. They overestimate their contribution
to a joint effort, chalk up their successes to skill and their failures to luck, and
always feel that the other side has gotten the better deal in a compromise.”
People keep up these self-serving illusions even when they are wired to what
they think is an accurate lie-detector. This shows that they are not lying to the
experimenter but lying to themselves. For decades every psychology student
has learned about "cognitive dissonance reduction:' in which people change
whatever opinion it takes to maintain a positive self-image." The cartoonist
Scott Adams illustrates it well:

Dilbertreprinted by permission of United Feature Syndicate, Inc.

If the cartoon were completely accurate, though, life would be a cacophony of
spoinks.

Self-deception is among the deepest roots of human strife and folly. It im¬
plies that the faculties that ought to allow us to settle our differences-seeking
the truth and discussing it rationally-are miscalibrated so that all parties as¬
sess themselves to be wiser, abler, and nobler than they really are. Each party to
a dispute can sincerely believe that the logic and evidence are on his side and

The Many Roots of Our Suffering / 265

that his opponent is deluded or dishonest or both." Self-deception is one of
the reasons that the moral sense can, paradoxically, often do more harm than
good, a human misfortune we will explore in the next chapter.

THE many roots of our suffering illuminated by Trivers are not a cause for
lamentations and wailings. The genetic overlaps that unite and divide us are
tragic not in the everyday sense of a catastrophe but in the dramatic sense of a
stimulus that encourages us to ponder our condition. According to a defini¬
tion in the Cambridge Encyclopedia, "The fundamental purpose of tragedy ...
was claimed by Aristotle to be the awakening of pity and fear, of a sense of
wonder and awe at the human potential, including the potential for suffering;
it makes an assertion of human value in the face of a hostile universe." Trivers's
accounts of the inherent conflicts within families, couples, societies, and the
self can reinforce that purpose.

Nature may have played a cruel trick by slightly mistuning the emotions of
people who share their flesh and blood, but in doing so she provided steady
work for generations of authors and playwrights. Endless are the dramatic
possibilities inherent in the fact that two people can be bound by the strongest
emotional bonds in the living world and at the same time not always want the
best for each other. Aristotle was perhaps the first to note that tragic narratives
focus on family relations. A story about two strangers who fight to the death,
he pointed out, is nowhere near as interesting as a story about two brothers
who fight to the death. Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau, Oedipus and Laius,
Michael and Fredo, JR and Bobby, Frasier and Niles, Joseph and his brothers,
Lear and his daughters, Hannah and her sisters ... As cataloguers of dramatic
plots have noted for centuries, "enmity of kinsmen” and "rivalry of kinsmen”
are enduring formulas."

In his book Antigones, the literary critic George Steiner showed that the
Antigone legend has a singular place in Western literature. Antigone was the
daughter of Oedipus and Iocasta, but the fact that her father was her brother
and her sister was her mother was only the beginning ofher family troubles. In
defiance of King Creon, she buried her slain brother Polynices, and when the
king found out, he ordered her buried alive. She cheated him by killing herself
first, whereupon the king's son, who was madly in love with her and unable to
get her a pardon, killed himself on her grave. Steiner observes that Antigone is
widely considered "not only the finest of the Greek tragedies, but a work of art
nearer to perfection than any other produced by the human spirit.?" It has
been performed for more than two millennia and has inspired countless vari¬
ations and spinoffs. Steiner explains its enduring resonance:

It has, I believe,been given to only one literary text to express all the prin¬
cipal constants of conflict in the condition of man. These constants are

266/ Know Thyself

fivefold: the confrontation of men and ofwomen; of age and of youth; of
society and of the individual; of the living and the dead; of men and of
god(i'l. The conflicts which come of these five orders of confrontation
are not negotiable. Men and women, old and young, the individual and
the community or state, the quick and the dead, mortals and immortals,
define themselves in the conflictual process of defining each other." ...
Because Greek myths encode certain primary biological and social con¬
frontations and self-perceptions in the history of man, they endure as an
animate legacy in collective memory and recognition."

The bittersweet process of defining ourselves bY,our conflicts with others
is not just a subject for literature but can illuminate the nature of our emotions
and the content of our consciousness. If a genie offered us the choice between
belonging to a species that could achieve perfect egalitarianism and solidarity
and belonging to a species like ours in which relationships with parents, sib¬
lings, and children are uniquely precious, it is not so clear that we would
choose the former. Our close relatives have a special place in our hearts only
because the place for every other human being, by definition, is less special,
and we have seen that many social injustices fallout of that bargain. So, too, is
social friction a product of our individuality and of our pursuit of happiness.
We may envy the harmony of an ant colony, but when Woody Allen's alter ego
Z complained to his psychiatrist that he felt insignificant, the psychiatrist
replied, "You’ve made areal breakthrough, Z. Youareinsignificant.”

Donald Symons has argued that we have genetic conflict to thank for the'
fact that we have feelings toward other people at all." Consciousness is a man¬
ifestation of the neural computations necessary to figure out how to get the
rare and unpredictable things we need. We feel hunger, savor food, and have a
palate for countless fascinating tastes because food was hard to get during
most of our evolutionary history. We don't normally feel longing, delight, or
fascination regarding oxygen, even though it is crucial for survival, because it
was never hard to obtain. Wejust breathe.

The same may be true of conflicts over kin, mates, and friends. I men¬
tioned that if a couple were guaranteed to be faithful, to favor each other over
their kin, and to die at the same time, their genetic interests would be identi¬
cal, wrapped up in their common children. One can even imagine a species in
which every couple was marooned on an island for life and their offspring dis¬
persed at maturity, never to return. Since the genetic interests ofthe two mates
are identical, one might at first think that evolution would endow them with a
blissful perfection of sexual, romantic, and companionate love.

But, Symons argues, nothing ofthe sort would happen. The relation be¬
tween the mates would evolve to be like the relation among the cells of a single
body, whose genetic interests are also identical. Heart cells and lung cells don’t

The Many Roots of Our Suffering / 267

have to fall in love to get along in perfect harmony. Likewise, the couples in this
species would have sex only for the purpose of procreation (why waste en¬
ergy?), and sex would bring no more pleasure than the rest of reproductive
physiology such as the release of hormones or the formation of the gametes:

There would be no fallingin love, because there would be no alternative
mates to choose among, and falling in love would be a huge waste. You
would literally love your mate as yourself, but that's the point: you don't
really love yourself, except metaphorically; you areyourself. The two of
you would be, as far as evolution is concerned, one flesh, and your rela¬
tionship would be governed by mindless physiology.... You might feel
pain if you observed your mate cut herself, but all the feelings we have
about our mates that make a relationship so wonderful when it is work¬
ing well (and so painful when it is not) would never evolve. Even if a
species had them when they took up this way of life, they would be se¬
lected out as surely as the eyes of a cave-dwelling fish are selected out,
because they would be all cost and no benefit."

The same is true for our emotions toward family and friends: the richness and
intensity of the feelings in our minds are proof of the preciousness and
fragility of those bonds in life. In short, without the possibility of suffering,
what we would have is not harmonious bliss, but rather, no consciousness

at all.

268 / Know Thyself

Chapter 15

The Sanctimonious Animal

ONE of THE deepest fears people have of a biological understanding of the
mind is that it would lead to moral nihilism. If we are not created by God for
a higher purpose, say the critics on the right, or if we are products of selfish
genes, say the critics on the left, then what would prevent us from becoming
amoral egoists who look out only for number one? Wouldn't we have to see
ourselves as venal mercenaries who cannot be expected to care for the less for¬
tunate? Both sides point to Nazism as the outcome of accepting biological the¬
ories of human nature.

The preceding chapter showed that this fear is misplaced. Nothing pre¬
vents the godless and amoral process of natural selection from evolving a big¬
brained social species equipped with an elaborate moral sense. 1 Indeed, the
problem with Homo sapiens may not be that we have too little morality. The
problem may be that we have too much.

What leads people to deem an action immoral ("Killing is wrong") as op¬
posed to disliked ((I hate broccoli"), unfashionable ((Don't wear stripes with
plaids"), or imprudent ((Avoid wine on long flights")? People feel that moral
rules are universal. Injunctions against murder and rape, for example, are not
matters of taste or fashion but have a transcendent and universal warrant. Peo¬
ple feel that others who commit immoral acts ought to be punished: not only
is it right to inflict harm on people who have committed a moral infraction, it
is wrong not to, that is, to «let them get away with it," One can easily say, «I don't
like broccoli, but I don't care if you eat it," but no one would say,«I don't like
killing, but I don't care if you murder someone." That is why pro-choice advo¬
cates are missing the point when they say, in the words of the bumper sticker,
«If you're against abortion, don't have one." If someone believes abortion is
immoral, then allowing other people to engage in it is not an option, any more
than allowing people to rape or murder is an option. People therefore feeljus-
tified in invoking divine retribution or the coercive power of the state to enact

The Sanctimonious Animal / 269

the punishments. Bertrand Russell wrote, "The infliction of cruelty with a
good conscience is a delight to moralists-that is why they invented hell:'

Our moral sense licenses aggression against others as a way to prevent or
punish immoral acts. That is fine when the act deemed immoral truly zsim-
moral by any standard, such as rape and murder, and when the aggression is '
meted out fairly and serves as a deterrent. The point of this chapter is that the
human moral sense is not guaranteed to pick out those acts as the targets of its
righteous indignation. The moral sense is a gadget, like stereo vision or intu¬
itions about number. It is an assembly of neural circuits cobbled together from
older parts of the primate brain and shaped by natural selection to do a job.
That does not mean that morality is a figment of our imagination, any more
than the evolution of depth perception means that 3-D space is a figment of
our imagination. (As we saw in Chapters 9 and 11, morality has an internal
logic, and possibly even an external reality, that a community of reflective
thinkers may elucidate, just as a community of mathematicians can elucidate
truths about number and shape.) But it does mean that the moral sense is
laden with quirks and prone to systematic error-moral illusions, as it were-
just like our other faculties.

Consider this story:

Julie and Mark are brother and sister. They are traveling together in
France on summer vacation from college. One night they are staying
alone in a cabin near the beach. They decide that it would be interesting
and fun if they tried making love. At the very least it would be a new ex¬
perience for each of them. Julie was already taking birth control pills,
but Mark uses a condom too, just to be safe. They both enjoy making
love, but they decide not to do it again. They keep the night as a special
secret, which makes them feel even closer to each other. What do you
think about that; was it OK for them to make love?

The psychologist Jonathan Haidt and his colleagues have presented the story
to many people.' Most immediately declare that what Julie and Mark did was
wrong, and then they grope for reasons why it was wrong. They mention the
dangers of inbreeding, but they are reminded that the siblings used two forms
of contraception. They suggest that Julie and Mark will be emotionally hurt,
but the story makes it clear that they were not. They venture that the act would
offend the community, but then they recall that it was kept secret. They submit
that it might interfere with future relationships, but they acknowledge that
Julie and Mark agreed never to do it again. Eventually many of the respondents
admit, «I don't know, 1 can't explain it, 1 just know it’s wrong:' Haidt calls this
«moral dumbfounding" and has evoked it by other disagreeable but victimless
scenarios:

270/ Know Thyself

A woman is cleaning out her closet, and she finds her old American flag.

She doesn't want the flag anymore, so she cuts it up into pieces and uses
the rags to clean her bathroom.

A family's dog was killed by a car in front of then house. They had heard
that dog meat was delicious, so they cut up the dog's body and cooked it
and ate it for dinner.

A man goes to the supermarket once a week and buys a dead chicken.

But before cooking the chicken, he has sexual intercourse with it. Then
he cooks it and eats it.

Many moral philosophers would say that there is nothing wrong with these
acts, because private acts among consenting adults that do not harm other sen¬
tient beings are not immoral. Some might criticize the acts using a more sub¬
tle argument having to do with commitments to policies, but the infractions
would still be deemed minor compared with the truly heinous acts of which
people are capable. But for everyone else, such argumentation is beside the
point. People have gut feelings that givethem emphatic moral convictions, and
they struggle to rationalize the convictions after the fact.' These convictions
may have little to do with moral judgments that one could justify to o.thersin
terms of their effects on happiness or suffering. They arise instead from the
neurobiological and evolutionary design of the organs we call moral emotions.

haidt has recently compiled a natural history of the emotions making
up the moral sense." The four major families are just what we would expect
from Trivets's theory of reciprocal altruism and the computer models of the
evolution of cooperation that followed. The other-condemning emotions-
contempt, anger, and disgust-prompt one to punish cheaters. The other-
praising emotions-gratitude and an emotion that may be called elevation,
moral awe, or being moved-prompt one to reward altruists. The other-
suffering emotions-sympathy,-compassion, and empathy-prompt one to
help a needy beneficiary. And the self-conscious emotions-guilt, shame, and
embarrassment-prompt one to avoid cheating or to repair its effects.

Cutting across these sets of emotiorts we find a distinction among three
spheres of morality, each of which frames moral judgments in a different way.
The ethic of autonomy pertains to an individual's interests and rights. It em¬
phasizes fairness as the cardinal virtue, and is the core of morality as it is un¬
derstood by secular educated people in Western cultures. The ethic of
community pertains to the mores of the social group; it includes values like
duty, respect, adherence to convention, and deference to a hierarchy. The ethic
of divinity pertains to a sense of exalted purity and holiness, which is opposed
to a sense of contamination and defilement.

The Sanctimonious Animal / 271

The autonomy-community-divinity trichotomy was first developed by
the anthropologist Richard Shweder, who noted that non-Western traditions
have rich systems of beliefs and values with all the hallmarks of moralizing
but without the Western concept of individual rights." The elaborate Hindu
beliefs surrounding purification are a prime example. Haidt and the psy¬
chologist Paul Rozin have built on Shweder's work, but they have interpreted
the moral spheres not as arbitrary cultural variants but as universal mental
faculties with different evolutionary origins and functions." They show that
the moral spheres differ in their cognitive content, their homologues in
other animals, their physiological correlates, and their neural underpin¬
nings.

Anger, for example, which is the other-condemning emotion in the sphere
of autonomy, evolved from systems for aggression and was recruited to imple¬
ment the cheater-punishment strategy demanded by reciprocal altruism. Dis¬
gust, the other-condemning emotion in the sphere of divinity, evolved from a
system for avoiding biological contaminants like disease and spoilage. It may
have been recruited to demarcate the moral circle that divides entities that we
engage morally (such as peers) from those we treat instrumentally (such as an¬
imals) and those we actively avoid (such as people with a contagious disease).
Embarrassment, the self-conscious emotion in the sphere of community, is a
dead ringer for the gestures of appeasement and submission found in other
primates. The reason that dominance got melded with morality in the first
place is that reciprocity depends not only on a person's willingness to grant
and return favors but on that person's ability to do so, and dominant people
have that ability.

Relativists might interpret the three spheres of morality as showing that
individual rights are a parochial Western custom and that we should respect
other cultures' ethics of community and divinity as equally valid alternatives.
I conclude instead that the design of the moral sense leaves people in all cul¬
tures vulnerable to confusing defensible moral judgments with irrelevant pas¬
sions and prejudices. The ethic of autonomy or fairness is in fact not uniquely
Western; Amartya Sen and the legal scholar Mary Ann Glendon have shown
that it also has deep roots in Asian thought." Conversely, the ethic of commu¬
nity and the ethic of divinity are pervasive in the West. The ethic of commu¬
nity, which equates morality with a conformity to local norms, underlies the
cultural relativism that has become boilerplate on college campuses. Several
scholars have noticed that their students are unequipped to explain why
Nazism was wrong, because the students feel it is impermissible to criticize the
values of another culture." (1 can confirm that students today reflexively hedge
their moral judgments, saying things like, "Our society puts a high value on
being good to other people.") Donald Symons comments on the way that peo-

272/ Know Thyself

pie's judgments can do a backflip when they switch from autonomy- to
community-based morality:

If only one person in the world held down a terrified, struggling,
screaming little girl, cut off her genitals with a septic blade, and sewed
her back up. leaving'only a tiny hole for urine and menstrual flow, the
only question would be how severely that person should be punished,
and whether the death penalty would be a sufficiently severe sanction.

But when millions of people do this, instead of the enormity being mag¬
nified millions-fold, suddenly it becomes "culture," and thereby magi¬
cally becomes less, rather than more, horrible, and is even defended by
some Western "moral thinkers:’ including feminists."

The ethic of community also includes a deference to an established hier¬
archy, and the mind (including the Western mind) all too easily conflates pres¬
tige with morality. We see it in words that implicitly equate status with
virtue-chivalrous, classy, gentlemanly, honorable, noble-and low rank with
sin-low-class, low-rent, mean, nasty, shabby, shoddy, villain (originally mean¬
ing "peasant"), vulgar. The Myth of the Noble Noble is obvious in contempo¬
rary celebrity worship. Members of the royalty like Princess Diana and her
American equivalent, John F. Kennedy Ir., are awarded the trappings of saint¬
hood even though they were morally unexceptional people (yes, Diana sup¬
ported charities, but that's pretty much the job description of a princess in this
day and age). Their good looks brighten their halos even more, because people
judge attractive men and women to be more virtuous." Prince Charles, who
also supports charities, will never be awarded the trappings of sainthood, even
if he dies a tragic death.

People also confuse morality with purity, even in the secular West. Re¬
member from Chapter 1 that many words for cleanliness and dirt are also
words for virtue and sin (pure, unblemished, tainted, and so on). Haidt's sub¬
jects seem to have conflated contamination with sin when they condemned
eating a dog, having sex with a dead chicken, and enjoying consensual incest
(which reflects our instinctive repulsion toward sex with siblings, an emotion
that evolved to deter inbreeding).

The mental mix-up ofthe good and the clean can have ugly consequences.
Racism and sexism are often expressed as a desire to avoid pollutants, as in
the ostracism of the "untouchable" caste in India, the sequestering of men¬
struating women in Orthodox Judaism, the fear of contracting AIDS from ca¬
sual contact with gay men, the segregated facilities for eating, drinking,
bathing, and sleeping under the Jim Crow and apartheid policies, and the
“racial hygiene" laws in Nazi Germany. One of the haunting questions of

The Sanctimonious Animal / 273

twentieth-century history is how so many ordinary people committed
wartime atrocities. The philosopher Jonathan Glover has documented that a
common denominator is degradation: a diminution of the victim's status or
cleanliness or both. When someone strips a person of dignity by making jokes
about his suffering, giving him a humiliating" appearance (a dunce cap, awk¬
ward prison garb, a crudely shaved head), or forcing him to live in filthy con¬
ditions, ordinary people's compassion can evaporate and they find it easy to
treat him like an animal or object."

The peculiar mixture offairness, status, and purity constituting the moral
sense should make us suspicious of appeals to raw sentiment in resolving dif¬
ficult moral issues. In an influential essay called "The Wisdom of Repug¬
nance;' Leon Kass (now the chair of George W. Bush's Council on Bioethics)
argued that we should abandon moral reasoning when it comes to cloning and
go with our gut feelings:

We are repelled by the prospect of cloning human beings not because of
the strangeness or novelty ofthe undertaking, but because we intuit and
feel, immediately and without argument, the violation of things that we
rightfully hold dear. Repugnance, here as elsewhere, revolts against the
excesses of human willfulness, warning us not to transgress what is un¬
speakably profound. Indeed, in this age in which everything is held to be
permissible so long as it is freely done, in which our given human nature
no longer commands respect, in which our bodies are regarded as mere
instruments of our autonomous rational wills, repugnance may be the
only voice left that speaks up to defend the central core of our human¬
ity. Shallow are the souls that have forgotten how to shudder.F

There may be good arguments against human cloning, but the shudder
test is not one of them. People have shuddered at all kinds of morally irrele¬
vant violations of standards of purity in their culture; touching an untouch¬
able, drinking from the same water fountain as a person of color, allowing
Jewish blood to mix with Aryan blood, tolerating sodomy between consenting
men. As recently as 1978, many people (including Kass) shuddered at the new
technology of in vitro fertilization, or, as it was then called, "test-tube babies."
But now it is morally unexceptionable and, for hundreds ofthousands ofpeo-
ple, a source of immeasurable happiness or of life itself.

The difference between a defensible moral position and an atavistic gut
feeling is that with the former we can give reasons why our conviction is valid.
We can explain why torture and murder and rape are wrong, or why we should
oppose discrimination and injustice. On the other hand, no good reasons can
be produced to show why homosexuality should be suppressed or why the
races should be segregated. And the good reasons for a moral position are not

274/Know Thyself

pulled outofthin air: they always have to do with what makes people better off
or worse off, and are grounded in the logic that we have to treat other people
in the way that we demand they treat us.

ANOTHER STRANGE FEATURE of the moral emotions is that they can be
turned on and off like a switch. These mental spoinks are called moralization
and amoralization, and have recently been studied in the lab by Rozin." They
consist in flipping between a mindset that judges behavior in terms of prefer¬
ence with a mindset that judges behavior in terms of value.

There are two kinds of vegetarians: those who avoid meat for health rea¬
sons, namely reducing dietary fat and toxins, and those who avoid meat for
moral reasons, namely respecting the rights of animals. Rozin has shown that
compared with health vegetarians, moral vegetarians offer more reasons for
their meat avoidance, have a greater emotional reaction to meat, and are more
likely to treat it as a contaminant-they refuse, for example, to eat a bowl of
soup into which a drop of meat broth has fallen. Moral vegetarians are more
likely to think that other people should be vegetarians, and they are more
likely to invest their dietary habit with bizarre virtues, like believing that meat
eating makes people more aggressive and animalistic. But it is not just vege¬
tarians who associate eating habits with moral value. When college students
are given descriptions of people and asked to rate their character, they judge
that a person who eats cheeseburgers and milkshakes is less nice and consider¬
ate than a person who eats chicken and salad!

Rozin notes that smoking has recently been moralized. For many years the
decision of whether to smoke was treated as a matter of preference or pru¬
dence: some people simply didn't enjoy smoking or avoided it because it was
hazardous to their health. But with the discovery of the harmful effects of sec¬
ondhand smoke, smoking is now treated as an immoral act. Smokers are ban¬
ished and demonized, and the psychology of disgust and contamination is
brought into play. Nonsmokers avoid not j,ust smoke but anything that has
ever been in contact with smoke: in hotels, they demand smoke-free rooms or
even smoke-free floors. Similarly, the desire for retribution has been awak¬
ened: juries have slapped tobacco companies with staggering financial penal¬
ties, appropriately called "punitive damages." This is not to say that these
decisions are unjustified, only that we should be aware of the emotions that
may be driving them.

At the same time, many behaviors have been amoralized, switching (in the
eyes of many people) from moral flawsto lifestyle choices. The amoralized acts
include divorce, illegitimacy, working motherhood, marijuana use, homosex¬
uality, masturbation, sodomy, oral sex, atheism, and any practice of a non-
Western culture. Similarly, many afflictions have been reassigned from the
wages of sin to the vagaries of bad luck and have been redubbed accordingly.

The Sanctimonious Animal! 275

The homeless used to be called bums and tramps; sexually transmitted dis¬
eases were formerly known as venereal diseases. Most ofthe professionals who
work with drug addiction insist that it is not a bad choice but a kind of illness.

To the cultural right, all this shows that morality has been under assault
from the cultural elite, as we see in the sect that calls itself the Moral Majority.
To the left, it shows that the desire to stigmatize private behavior is archaic and
repressive, as in H. 1. Mencken's definition of Puritanism as "the haunting fear
that someone, somewhere, may be happy." Both sides are wrong. As if to com¬
pensate for all the behaviors that have been amoralized in recent decades, we
are in the midst of a campaign to moralize new ones. The Babbitts and the
bluenoses have been replaced by the activists for a nanny state and the college
towns with a foreign policy, but the psychology of moralization is the same.
Here are some examples of things that have acquired a moral coloring only re¬
cently:

advertising to children • automobile safety • Barbie dolls • "big box"
chain stores • cheesecake photos • clothing from Third World factories

• consumer product safety • corporate-owned farms • defense-funded
research • disposable diapers • disposable packaging • ethnic jokes • ex¬
ecutive salaries • fast food • flirtation in the workplace • food additives

• fur • hydroelectric dams • IQ tests • logging • mining • nuclear power

• oil drilling • owning certain stocks • poultry farms • public holidays
(Columbus Day,Martin Luther King Day) • research on AIDS • research
on breast cancer • spanking • suburbia (“sprawl”) • sugar • tax cuts • toy
guns • violence on television • weight of fashion models

Many of these things can have harmful consequences, of course, and no
one would want them trivialized. The question is whether they are best han¬
dled by the psychology of moralization (with its search for villains, elevation
of accusers, and mobilization of authority to mete out punishment) or in
terms of costs and benefits, prudence and risk, or good and bad taste. Pollu¬
tion, for example, is often treated as a crime of defiling the sacred, as in the
song by the rock group Traffic: "Why don't we ... try to save this land, and
make a promise not to hurt again this holy ground." This can be contrasted
with the attitude of economists like Robert Frank, who (alluding to the costs
of cleanups) said, "There is an optimal amount of pollution in the environ¬
ment) just as there is an optimal amount of dirt in your house."

Moreover) all human activities have consequences, often with various de¬
grees ofbenefit and harm to different parties) but not all of them are conceived
as immoral. We don't show contempt to the man who fails to change the bat¬
teries in his smoke alarms, takes his family on a driving vacation (multiplying
their risk of accidental death), or moves to a rural area (increasing pollution

276/ Know Thyself

and fuel use in commuting and shopping). Driving a gas-guzzling SUV is seen
as morally dubious, but driving a gas-guzzling Volvois not; eating a Big Mac is
suspect, but eating imported cheese or tiramisu is not. Becoming aware of the
psychology of moralization need not make us morally obtuse. On the con¬
trary, it can alert us to the possibility that a decision to treat an act in terms of
virtue and sin as opposed to cost and benefit has been made on morally irrel¬
evant grounds-in particular, whether the saints and sinners would be in one's
own coalition or someone else's. Much of what is today called "social criti¬
cism” consists of members of the upper classes denouncing the tastes of the
lower classes (bawdy entertainment, fast food, plentiful consumer goods)
while considering themselves egalitarians.

THERE is ANOTHER bit of moral psychology that is commonly associated
with primitive thinking but is alive and well in modern minds: concepts of the
sacred and the taboo. Some values are considered not just worthy but sacro¬
sanct. They have infinite or transcendental worth, trumping all other consid¬
erations. One is not permitted even to think of trading them off against other
values, because the very thought is self-evidently sinful and deserves only con¬
demnation and outrage.

The psychologist Philip Tetlock elicited the psychology of the sacred and
the taboo in the students of American universities." He asked them whether
people should be allowed to buy and sell organs for transplantation, auction
licenses to adopt orphans, pay for the right to become a citizen, sell their vote
in an election, or pay someone to serve in their stead in prison or the military.
Not surprisingly, most of the students thought that the practices were unethi¬
cal and should be outlawed. But their responses went well beyond disagree¬
ment: they were outraged that anyone would consider legalizing these
practices, were insulted to have been asked, and wanted to punish anyone who
tolerated them. When they were asked to justify their opinion, all they could
say was that the practices were "degrading, dehumanizing, and unacceptable:'
The students even sought to cleanse themselves by volunteering to campaign
against a (fictitious) movement to legalize the auctioning of adoption rights.
Their outrage was reduced a bit, but was still potent, after hearing arguments
in favor of the taboo policies, such as that a market in orphans would put more
children in loving homes and that lower-income people would be given
vouchers to participate.

Another study asked about a hospital administrator who had to decide
whether to spend a million dollars on a liver transplant for a child or use it on
other hospital needs. (Administrators implicitly face this kind of choice all the
time, because there are lifesaving procedures that are astronomically expensive
and cannot be carried out on everyone who needs them.) Not only did re¬
spondents want to punish an administrator who chose to spend the money on

The Sanctimonious Animal! 277

the hospital, they wanted to punish an administrator who chose to save the
child but thought for a long time before making the decision (like the frugal
comedian JackBenny when a mugger said, "Yourmoney or your life").

The taboo on thinking about core values is not totally irrational. Wejudge
people not just on what they Jo but on what they are-not just on whether
someone has given more than he has taken, but on whether he is the kind of
person who would sell you down the river or knife you in the back if it were
ever in his interests to do so. To determine whether someone is emotionally
committed to a relationship, guaranteeing the veracity of his promises, one
should ascertain how he thinks: whether he holds your interests sacred or con¬
stantly weighs them against the profits to be made by selling you out. The no¬
tion of character joins the moral picture, and with it the notion of moral
identity: the concept of one's own character that is maintained internally and
projected to others.

Tetlock points out that it is in’ the very nature of our commitments to
other people to deny that we can put a price on them: "To transgress these nor¬
mative boundaries, to attach a monetary value to one’s friendships or one's
children or one’s loyalty to one's country, is to disqualify oneself from certain
societal roles, to demonstrate that one just (doesn't get if-one does not un¬
derstand what it means to be a true friend or parent or citizen/"" Taboo trade¬
offs, which pit a sacred value against a secular one (such as money), are
"morally corrosive: the longer one contemplates indecent proposals, the more
irreparably one compromises one's moral identity?"

Unfortunately, a psychology that treats some desiderata as having infinite
value can lead to absurdities. Tetlock reviews some examples. The Delaney
Clause of the Food and Drug Act of 1958 sought to improve public health by
banning all new food additives for which there was any risk of carcinogenicity.
That sounded good but wasn't. The policy left people exposed to more-
dangerous food additives that were already on the market, it created an incen¬
tive for manufacturers to introduce new dangerous additives as long as they
were not carcinogenic, and it outlawed products that could have saved more
lives than they put at risk, such as the saccharin used by diabetics. Similarly
after the discovery of hazardous waste at the Love Canal in 1978, Congress
passed the Superfund Act, which required the complete cleanup of all haz¬
ardous waste sites. It turned out to cost millions of dollars to clean up the last
10 percent of the waste at a given site-money that could have been spent on
cleaning up other sites or reducing other health risks. So the lavish fund went
bankrupt before even a fraction of its sites could be decontaminated, and its
effect on Americans' health was debatable. After the Exxon Valdez oil spill,
four-fifths of the respondents in one poll said that the country should pursue
greater environmental protection "regardless of cost." Taken literally, that
meant they were prepared to shut down all schools, hospitals, and police and

27 8/Know Thyself

fire stations, stop funding social programs, medical research, foreign aid, and
national defense, or raise the income tax rate to 99 percent, if that is what it
would have cost to protect the environment.

Tetlock observes that these fiascoescame about because any politician who
honestly presented the inexorable tradeoffs would be crucified for violating a
taboo. He would be guilty of "tolerating poisons in our food and water;' or
worse, "putting a dollar value on human life."Policy analysts note that we are
stuck with wasteful and inegalitarian entitlement programs because any politi¬
cian who tried to reform them would be committing political suicide. Savvy
opponents would frame the reform in the language of taboo: "breaking our
faith with the elderly;' "betraying the sacred trust ofveterans who risked their
lives for their country;' "scrimping on the care and education ofthe young."

In the Preface, I called the Blank Slate a sacred doctrine and human nature
a modern taboo. This can now be stated as a technical hypothesis. The thrust
of the radical science movement was to .moralize the scientific study of the
mind and to engage the mentality of taboo. Recall, from Part II, the indignant
outrage, the punishment of heretics, the refusal to consider claims as they were
actually stated, the moral cleansing through demonstrations and manifestos
and public denunciations. Weizenbaum condemned ideas "whose very con¬
templation ought to give rise to feelings of disgust" and denounced the less-
than-human scientists who "can even think of such a thing:'But of course it is
the job of scholars to think about things, even if only to make it clear why they
are wrong. Moralization and scholarship thus often find themselves on a colli¬
sion course.

THIS RUTHLESS DISSECTION ofthe human moral sense does not mean that
morality is a sham or that every moralist is a self-righteous prig. Moral psy¬
chology may be steeped in emotion, but then many philosophers have argued
that morality cannot be grounded in reason alone anyway. As Hume wrote,
’"Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction ofthe whole world to the
scratching of my finger,"? The emotions of sympathy, gratitude, and guilt are
the source of innumerable acts of kindness great and small, and a measured
righteous anger and ethical certitude must have sustained great moral leaders
throughout history.

Glover notes that many twentieth-century atrocities were set in motion
when the moral emotions were disabled. Decent people were lulled into com¬
mitting appalling acts by a variety of amoralizing causes, such as utopian ide¬
ologies, phased decisions (in which the targets of bombing might shift from
isolated factories to factories near neighborhoods to the neighborhoods them¬
selves), and the diffusion of responsibility within a bureaucracy. It was often
raw moral sentiment-feeling empathy for victims, or asking oneself the
moral-identity question "Am I the kind of person who could do this?"-that

The Sanctimonious Animal / 279

stopped people in mid-atrocity. The moral sense, amplified and extended by
reasoning and a knowledge of history, is what stands between us and a Mad
Max nightmare of ruthless psychopaths.

But there is still much to be wary of in human moralizing: the confusion
of morality with status and purity, the temptation to overmoralize matters of
judgment and thereby license aggression against those with whom we dis¬
agree, the taboos on thinking about unavoidable tradeoffs, and the ubiquitous
vice of self-deception, which always manages to put the self on the side of the
angels. Hitler was a moralist (indeed, a moral vegetarian) who, by most ac¬
counts, was convinced of the rectitude of his cause. As the historian Ian Bu-
ruma wrote, "This shows once again that true believers can be more dangerous
than cynical operators. The latter might cut a deal; the former have to go to the
end-and drag the world down with them." i8

280 / Know Thyself

past

HOT B UTTONS

S ome debates are so entwined with people's moral identity that one
might despair that they can ever be resolved by reason and evidence. So¬
cial psychologists have found that with divisive moral issues, especially
those on which liberals and conservatives disagree, all combatants are intu¬
itively certain they are correct and that their opponents have ugly ulterior mo¬
tives. They argue out of respect for, the social convention that one should
always provide reasons for one's opinions, but when an argument is refuted,
they don’t change their minds but work harder to find a replacement argu¬
ment Moral debates, far from resolving hostilities, can escalate them, b^puse
when people on the other side don't immediately capitulate, it only proves
they are impervious to reason. 1

Nowhere is this more obvious than'in the topics I will explore in this part
of the book. People’s opinions on politics, violence, gender, children, 'and the
arts help define the kind of person they think they are and the kind of person
they want to be. They prove that the person is opposed to oppression, violence,
sexism, philistinism, and the abuse or neglect of children. Unfortunately,
folded into these opinions are assumptions about the psychological makeup of
Homo sapiens. Conscientious people may thus find themselves unwittingly
staked to positions on empirical questions in biology or psychology. When sci¬
entific facts come in they rarely conform exactly to our expectations; if they
did, we would not have to do science in the first place. So when facts tip over a
sacred cow,people are tempted to suppress the facts and to clamp down on de¬
bate because the facts threaten everything they hold sacred. And this can leave
us unequipped to deal with just those problems for which new facts and analy¬
ses are most needed.

The landscape of the sciences of human nature is strewn with these third
rails, hot zones, black holes, and Chernobyls. I have picked five of them to ex¬
plore in the next few chapters, while necessarily leaving out many others (for
instance, race, sexual orientation, education, drug abuse, and mental illness).

Hot Buttons / 281

Social psychologists have discovered that even in heated ideological battles,
common ground can sometimes be found.' Each side must acknowledge that
the other is arguing out of principle, too, and that they both share certain val¬
ues and disagree only over which to emphasize in cases where they conflict.
Finding such common ground is my goal in the discussions to follow.

2 8 2/ Hot Buttons

Chapter 16

Politics

I often think it's comical
How nature always does contrive
That every boy and every gal,
That’s born into the world alive,
Is either a little Liberal,

Or else a little Conservative!'

GILBERT AND SULLIVAN got it mostly right in 1882: liberal and conservative
political attitudes are largely, though far from completely, heritable. When
identical twins who were separated at birth are tested in adulthood, their po¬
litical attitudes turn out to be similar, with a correlation coefficient of .62 (on
a scale from -1 to +1).2 Liberal and conservative attitudes are heritable not, of
course, because attitudes are synthesized directly from DNA but because they
come naturally to people with different temperaments. <

. feteodtobes

noun

But whatever its immediate source, the heritability 6f political

attitudes can explain some of the sparks that fly when liberals and conserva¬
tives meet. When it comes to attitudes that are heritable, people react more
quickly and emotionally, are less likely to change their minds, and are more at¬
tracted to like-minded people.'

Liberalism and conservatism have not just genetic roots, of course, but
historical and intellectual ones. The two political philosophies were articu¬
lated in the in terms that would be familiar to readers of

the editorial pages today, and their foaftdafwros can be-traced back mifenfrif

to the political controversies of ancient Greece. During the past three cen¬
turies, many revolutions and uprisings were fought overghese philgsophies, as
are the major elections in modern democracies.

This chapter is about the intellectual connections between the sciences of
human nature and the political rift between right-wing and left-wing political

Politics/283

philosophies. The connection is not a secret. As philosophers have long noted,
the two sides are not just political belief systems but empirical ones, rooted in
different conceptions of human nature. Small wonder that the sciences of
human nature have been so explosive. Evolutionary psychology, behavioral
genetics, and some parts of cognitive neuroscience are widely seen as falling on
the political right, which in a modern university is about the worst thing you
can say about something. No one can make sense of the controversies sur¬
rounding mind, brain, genes, and evolution without understanding their
alignment with ancient political fault lines. E. O. Wilson learned this too late:

I had been blindsided by the attack [on Sociobiology]. Having expected
some frontal fire from social scientists on primarily evidential grounds,

I had received instead a political enfilade from the flank. A few observers
were surprised that I was surprised. John Maynard Smith, a senior
British evolutionary biologist and former Marxist, said that he disliked
the last chapter of Sociobiology himself and “it was also absolutely obvi¬
ous to me-s-I cannot believe Wilson didn't know-that this was going to
provoke great hostility from American Marxists, and Marxists every¬
where:' But it was true.... In 1975 I was a political naif: I knew almost
nothing about Marxism as either a political belief or a mode of analysis,

I had paid little attention to the dynamism of the activist left, and I had
never heard of Science for the People. I was not even an intellectual in
the European or New York-Cambridge sense."

As we shall see, the new sciences of human nature really do resonate with
assumptions that historically were closer to the right than to the left. But today
the alignments are not as predictable. The accusation that these sciences are ir¬
redeemably conservative comes from the Left Pole, the mythical place from
which all directions are right. The political associations of a belief in human
nature now crosscut the liberal-conservative dimension, and many political
theorists invoke evolution and genetics to argue for policies on the left.

THE SCIENCES of human nature are pressing on two political hot buttons,
not just one. The first is hdw we conceptualize the entity known as “society.”
The political philosopher Roger Masters has shown how sociobiology (and re¬
lated theories invoking evolution, genetics, and brain science) inadvertently
took sides in an ancient dispute between two traditions of understanding the
social order,"

In the tradition, a society is a cohesive organic entity and its in¬

dividual citizens are mere parts. People are thought to be social by their very
nature and to function as constituents of a larger superorganism. This is the
tradition of Plato, Hegel, Marx, Durkheim, Weber, Kroeber, the sociologist

2 84/Hot'Buttons

Talcott Parsons, the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, and postmodernism
in the humanities and social sciences.

In th clition, society is an arrangement ne¬

gotiated by rational, self-interested In ividuals. Society emerges when people
agree to sacrifice some of their autonomy in exchange for security from the
depredations of others wielding f/teir autonomy. It is the tradition of Thrasy-
machus in Plato's Republic , and of Machiavelli. Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau,
Smith, and Bentham. In the twentieth century it became the basis for the ra¬
tional actor or "economic man" models in economics and political science,
and for cost-benefit analyses of public choices.

tion. It maintains that complex adaptations, including behavioral strategies,
evolved to benefit the individual (indeed, the genes for those traits within an
individual), not the community, species, or ecosystem.s Social organization
,evolves when the long-term benefits to the individual outweigh the immediate
costs. Darwin was influenced by Adam Smith, and many of his successors an¬
alyze the evolution of sociality using tools that come right out of economics,
such as game theory and other optimization techniques.

Reciprocal altruism, in particular, is just the traditional concept of the so¬
cial contract restated in biological terms. Of courselhumamwere never soli -
tary (as Rousseau and Hobbes incorrectly surmised), and they did not
inaugurate group living by haggling over a contract at a particular time and
place. Bands, clans, tribes, and other social groups are central to human exis¬
tence and have been so for as long as we have been a spccics.#utthe logic of SO*'
cial contracts may haye j 9 that

keep us in these groups. Social arrangements are evolutionarily contingent,
arising when the benefits of group living exceed the costs.' With a slightly dif¬
ferent ecosystem and evolutionary history, we could have ended up like our
cousins the orangutans, who are almost entirely solitary. And according to
evolutionary biology, all societies-animal and human-seethe with conflicts
of interest and are held together by shifting mixtures of dominance and coop¬
eration.

Throughout the book we have seen how the sciences of human nature
have clashed with the sociological tradition. The social sciences were taken
over by the doctrine that social facts live in their own universe, separate from
the universe of individual minds. In Chapter 4 we saw an alternative concep¬
tion in which cultures and societies arise from individual people pooling their
discoveries and negotiating the tacit agreements that underlie social reality.
We saw how a departure from the sociological paradigm was a major heresy of

Mandsffihnd playcda role in its disdain foxtheinterests of-indivktual people.

The division between the sociological and economic traditions is aligned

Politics / 285

with the division between the political left and the political right, but only
roughly. Marxism is obviously in the sociological tradition, and free-market
conservatism is obviously in the economic tradition. In the liberal 1960s, Lyn¬
don Johnson wanted to forge a Great Society, Pierre Trudeau a Just Society. In
the conservative 1980s, Margaret Thatcher said, «There is no such thing as so¬
ciety. There are individual men and women, and there are families."

But as Masters points out, Durkheim and Parsons were in the sociological
tradition, yet they were conservatives. One can easily see how conservative be¬
liefs can favor the preservation of society as an entity and thereby downplay
the desires of individuals. Conversely, Locke was in the social contract tradi¬
tion, hut he is a patron saint of liberalism, and Rousseau; who comed the ex¬
pression "social contract:' was aninspiration for liberal and'revolutionary
$&nker$. Social contracts, like any contract, can become unfair to some of the
signatories, and may have to be renegotiated progressively or redrawn from
scratch in a revolution. Als*. O^nu r. wiJi'Xjiui c^jrrvrhire.

So the clash between the sociological and economic traditions can explain
some of the heat ignited by the sciences of human nature, but it is not identi¬
cal to the firefight between the political left and the political right. The rest of
the chapter will scrutinize that second and hotter button.

THE RIGHT-LEFT AXIS aligns an astonishing collection of beliefs that at first
glance seem to have nothing in common. If you learn that someone is infavor
of a strong military, for example, it is a good bet that the person is also in favor
of judicial restraint rather than judicial activism. If someone believesan the
importance of religion, chances are she will be tough on crime and in favor of
lower taxes. Proponents of a laissez-faire economic policy tend to value patri¬
otism and the family, and they are more likely to be old than young, pragmatic
than idealistic, censorious than permissive, meritocratic than egalitarian,
gradualist than revolutionary, and in a business rather than a university or
government agency. The opposing positions cluster just as reliably: if someone
is sympathetic to rehabilitating offenders, or to affirmative action, or to gener¬
ous welfare programs, or to a tolerance of homosexuality, chances are good
that he will also be a pacifist, an environmentalist, an activist, an egalitarian, a
secularist, and a professor or student.

Why on earth should people's beliefs about sex predict their beliefs about
the size of the military? What does religion have to do with taxes? Whence the
linkage between strict construction of the Constitution and disdain for shock¬
ing art? Before we can understand why beliefs about an innate human nature
might cluster with liberal beliefs or with conservative beliefs, we have to un¬
derstand IvTty liberal beliefscjuster with other liberal beliefs and conservative
beliefs cluster with other conservative beliefs.

The meanings of the words are of no help. Marxists in the Soviet Union

286/Hot Buttons

and its aftermath were called conservatives; Reagan and Thatcher were called
revolutionaries. Lifrer&rs f 8feliberal about sexualbehavior but not about busi.
ness practices; eofiservativermnt to conserve communities and traditions,
but they also favor the free market economy that subverts them. People who
call themselves "classical liberals" are likely to be called "conservatives" by ad¬
herents of the version of leftism known as political correctness.

Nor can most contemporary liberals and conservatives articulate the cores
of their belief systems. Liberals think that conservatives are just amoral pluto¬
crats, and conservatives think that if you are not a liberal before you are twenty
you have no heart but if you are a liberal after you are twenty you have no brain
(attributed variously to Georges Clemenceau, Dean Inge, Benjamin Disraeli,
and Maurice Maeterlinck). Strategic alliances-such as the religious funda¬
mentalists and free-market technocrats on the right, or the identity politicians
and civil libertarians on the left-may frustrate the search for any intellectual
common denominator. Everyday political debates, such as whether tax rates
should be exactly what they are or a few points higher or lower, are just as un¬
informative. OV

The most sweeping attempt to s vey the underlying dimension is
Thomas Soweil } s A Conflict of * ** ' "&t' ot every ideological struggle fits his
scheme, but as we say in social science, he has identified a factor that can ac¬
count for a large proportion of the variance. Sowell explains two "visions" of
the nature of human beings that were expressed in their purest forms by-Ed-
mundjjairke (l729-d?97^ th.e.patron of secular conservatism, and. William
Gedwrn the British counterpart to Rousseau. In earher times

they might have’ been referred to as different visions of the perfectibility of
man. Sowell calls them the Constrained Vision and the Unconstrained Vision;
I will refer to them as the "§£agic ViskiC^a term he uses in a later book) and the
Utopian Vision?

In the Tragic Visionjfiumans are inherently limited in knowledge, wis¬
dom, and virtue, and all social arrangements must acknowledge those limits.
"Mortal things suit mortals best:’ wrote Pindar; "from the crooked timber of
humanity no truly straight thing can be made:' wrote Kant. The Tragic Vision
is associated with Hobbes, Burke, Smith, Alexander Hamilton, James Madi¬
son, the jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes Ir., the economists Friedrich Hayek and
Milton Friedman, the philosophers Isaiah Berlin and Karl Popper, and the
legal scholar Richard Posner.

In the Utopian Vision, psychological limitations are artifacts that come
from our social arrangements, and we should not allow them to restrict our
gaze from what is possible in a better world. Its creed might be "Some people
see things as they are and ask 'why?'; I dream things that never were and ask
'why not?’" The quotation is often attributed to the icon of 1960s liberalism,
Robert F. Kennedy, but it was originally penned by the Fabian socialist George

Politics / 287

Bernard Shaw (who also wrote, "There is nothing that can be changed more
completely than human nature when the job is taken in hand early enough"). 10
The Utopian Vision is also associated with Rousseau, Godwin, Condorcet,
Thomas Paine, the jurist Earl Warren, the economist John Kenneth Galbraith,
and to a lesser extent the political philosopher Ronald Dworkin.

In the Tragic Vision, our moral sentiments, no matter how beneficent,
overlie a deeper bedrock of selfishness. That selfishness is not the cruelty or
aggression of the psychopath, but a concern for our well-being that is so much
a part of our makeup that we seldom reflect on it and would waste our time
lamenting it or trying to erase it. In his book The Theory ofMoral Sentiments,
Adam Smith remarked:

Let us suppose that the great empire of China, with all its myriads of in¬
habitants, was suddenly swallowed up by an earthquake, and let us con¬
sider how a man of humanity in Europe, who had no sort of connection
with that part of the world, would react upon receiving intelligence of
this dreadful calamity. He would, I imagine, first of all express very
strongly his sorrow for the misfortune ofthat unhappy people, he would
make many melancholy reflections upon the precariousness of human
life, and the vanity of all the labours of man, which could thus be anni¬
hilated in a moment. He would, too, perhaps, if he was a man of specu¬
lation, enter into many reasonings concerning the effects which this
disaster might produce upon the commerce of Europe, and the trade
and business of the world in general. And when all this fine philosophy
was over, when all these humane sentiments had been once fairly ex¬
pressed, he would pursue his business or his pleasure, take his repose or
his diversion, with the same ease and tranquillity as if no such accident
had happened. The most frivolous disaster which could befall himself
would occasion a more real disturbance. If he was to lose his little finger
tomorrow, he would not sleep to-night; but provided he never saw
them, he would snore with the most profound security over the ruin of
a hundred million of his brethren."

In the Tragic Vision, moreover, human nature has not changed. Traditions
such as religion, the family, social customs, sexual mores, and political institu¬
tions are a distillation of time-tested techniques that let us work around the
shortcomings of human nature. They are as applicable to humans today as
they were when they developed, even if no one today can explain their ratio¬
nale. However imperfect society may be, we should measure it against the cru¬
elty and deprivation of the actual past, not the harmony and affluence of an
imagined future. fortunate eHOUgh to live in a society that more or less

^yorks, and our first priority should be not to screw it up, because human na-

288/Hot Buttons

ture always leaves us teetering on the brink of barbarism. And since no one is
smart enough to predict the behavior of a single human being, let alone mil¬
lions of them interacting in a society, we should distrust any formula for
changing society from the top down, because it is likely to have unintended
consequences that are worse than the problems it was designed to fix. The best
we can hope for are incremental changes that are continuously adjusted ac¬
cording to feedback about the sum oftheir good and bad consequences. It also

because in a wofld of competing individuals one person’s gafll fifffy be another
person’s loss. The best we can do is trade off one cost against another. In
Burke’s famous words, written in the aftermath of the French Revolution:

[One] should approach to the faults of the state as to the wounds of a fa¬
ther, with pious awe and trembling solicitude. Bythis wise prejudice we
are taught to look with horror on those children of their country who
are prompt rashly to hack that aged parent in pieces, and put him into
the kettle of magicians, in hopes that by their poisonous weeds, and wild
incantations, they may regenerate the paternal constitution, and reno¬
vate their father's life."

jl That was tfien, this is now.

In the Utopian Vision,
so traditional institution s h ave jm

Traditions are the dead hand of the past, the attempt to rule from the grave.
They must be stated explicitly so their rationale can be scrutinized and their
moral status evaluated. And by that test, many traditions fail: the confinement
of women to the home, the stigma against homosexuality and premarital sex,
the superstitions of religion, the injustice of apartheid and segregation, the
dangers of patriotism as exemplified in the mindless slogan "My country, right
or wrong." Practices such as absolute monarchy, slavery, war, and patriarchy
once seemed inevitable but have disappeared or faded from many parts of the
world through changes in institutions that were once thought to be rooted in
human nature. Moreover, the existence of suffering and injustice presents us
with an undeniable moral imperative. We don't know what we can achieve
until we try, and the alternative, resigning ourselves to these evils as the way of
the world, is unconscionable. At Robert Kennedy's funeral, his brother Edward
quoted from one of his recent speeches:

All of us will ultimately be judged and as the years pass we will surely
judge ourselves, on the effort we have contributed to building a new
world society and the extent to which our ideals and goals have shaped
that effort.

The future does not belong to those who are content with today.

Politics / 289

apathetic toward common problems and their fellow man alike, timid
and fearful in the face of new ideas and bold projects. Rather it will be¬
long to those who can blend vision, reason and courage in a personal
commitment to the ideals and great enterprises of American Society.

Our future may lie beyond our vision, but it is not completely be¬
yond our control. It is the shaping impulse of America that neither fate
nor nature nor the irresistible tides of history, but the work of our own
hands, matched to reason and principle, will determine our destiny.
There is pride in that, even arrogance, but there is also experience and
truth. In any event, it is the only way we can live.13

Those with the Tragic Vision are unmoved by ringing declarations attrib¬
uted to the first-person plural we, our, and us. They are more likely to use the
pronouns as the cartoon possum Pogo did: We have met the enemy, and he is
us. We are all members of the same flawed species. Putting our moral vision
into practice means imposing our will on others. The human lust for power
and esteem, coupled with its vulnerability to self-deception and self-
righteousness, makes that an invitation to a calamity, all the worse when that
power is directed at a goal as quixotic as eradicating human self-interest. As
the conservative philosopher Michael Oakshott wrote, «To try to do some¬
thing which is inherently impossible is al|pays a corrupting enterprise."

The two kinds of visionaries thereby fine up on opposite sides of many is¬
sues that would seem to have little in common. The Utopian Vision seeks to
articulate social goals and devise policies that target them directly: economic
inequality is attacked in a war on poverty, pollution by environmental regula¬
tions, racial imbalances by preferences, carcinogens by bans on food additives.
The Tragic Vision points to the self-interested motives of the people who
would implement these policies-namely, the expansion of their bureaucratic
fiefdoms-and to their ineptitude at anticipating the myriad consequences,
especially when the social goals are pitted against millions of people pursuing
their own interests. Thus, say the Tragic Visionaries, the Utopians fail to antic¬
ipate that welfare might encourage dependency, or that a restriction on one
pollutant might force people to use another.

Instead, the Tragic Vision looks to systems that produce desirable out¬
comes even when no member of the system is particularly wise or virtuous.
Market economies, in this vision, accomplish that goal: remember Smith's
butcher, brewer, and baker providing us with dinner out of self-interest rather
than benevolence. No mastermind has to understand the intricate flow of
goods and services that make up an economy in order to anticipate who needs
what, and when and where. Property rights give people an incentive to work
and produce; contracts allow them to enjoy gains in trade. Prices convey infor¬
mation about scarcity and demand to producers and consumers, so they can

290 /Hot Buttons

react by following a few simple rules-make more of what is profitable, buy less
ofwhatisexpensive-andthe "invisible hand" will do the rest. The intelligence
of the system is distributed across millions of not-necessarily-intelligent pro¬
ducers and consumers, and cannot be articulated by anyone in particular.

People with the Utopian Vision point to market failures that can result
from having a blind faith in free markets. They also call attention to the unjust
distribution of wealth that tends to be produced by free markets. Opponents
with the Tragic Vision argue that the notion of justice makes sense only when
applied to human decisions within a framework of laws, not when applied to
an abstraction called "society." Friedrich Hayek wrote, "The manner in which
the benefits and burdens are apportioned by the market mechanism would in
many instances have to be regarded as very unjust if it were the result of a de¬
liberate allocation to particular people." But that concern with social justice
rests on a confusion, he claimed, because "the particulars of [a spontaneous
order] cannot be just or unjust,"!'

Some of today's battles between left and right fall directly out of these dif¬
ferent philosophies: big versus small government, high versus low taxes, pro¬
tectionism versus free trade, measures that aim to reduce undesirable
outcomes (poverty, inequality, racial imbalance) versus measures that merely
level the playing field and enforce the rules. Other battles follow in a less obvi¬
ous way from the opposing visions of human potential. The Tragic Vision
stresses fiduciary duties, even when the person executing them cannot see their
immediate value, because they allow imperfect beings who cannot be sure of
their virtue or foresight to participate in a tested system. The Utopian Vision
stresses social responsibility, where people hold their actions to a higher ethi¬
cal standard. In Lawrence Kohlberg's famous theory of moral development, a
willingness to ignore rules in favor of abstract principles was literally identified
as a "higher stage" (which, perhaps tellingly, most people never reach).

The most obvious example is the debate on strict constructionism and ju¬
dicial restraint on one side and tudicialactiyllna in pursuit of social justice on
the other. Earl Warren, the chiefjustice ofthe U.S. Supreme Court from 1954
to 1969, was the prototypical judicial activist, who led the court to implement
desegregation and expand the rights of the accused. Fie was known for inter¬
rupting lawyers in mid-argument by asking, "Is it right? Is it good?" The op¬
posing view was stated by Oliver Wendell Holmes, who said his job was "to see
that the game is played according to the rules whether I like them or not.” He
conceded that "to improve conditions of life and the race is the main thing:'
and added, "But how the devil can I tell whether I am not pulling it down more
in some other place?"lS Those with the Tragic Vision see judicial activism as an
invitation to egotism and caprice and as unfair to those who have played by the
rules as they were publicly stated. Those with the Utopian Vision see judicial
restraint as the mindless preservation of arbitrary injustices-as Dickens's Mr.

Politics I 291

Bumble put it, "The law is an ass."? An infamous example is the Dfed Soott
decision of 1856, in which the Supreme Court ruled on narrow legalistic
grounds that a freed slave could not sue to make his freedom official and that
Congress could not prohibit slavery in federal territories.

Radical political reform, like radical judicial reform, will be more or less
appealing depending on one's confidence in human intelligence and wisdom.
In the Utopian Vision, solutions to social problems are readily available. Speak¬
ing in 1967 about the conditions that breed violence, Lyndon Johnson said, "All
of us know what those conditions are: ignorance, discrimination, slums,
poverty, disease, not enough jobs,"" If we already know the solutions, all we
have to do is choose to implement them, and that requires only sincerity and
dedication. By the same logic, anyone opposing the solutions must be moti¬
vated by blindness, dishonesty, and callousness. Those with the Tragic.Vision
instead that solutions to social problems are elusive. The inherent conflicts
of interest among people leave us with few options, all of them imperfect. Op¬
ponents of radical reform are showing a wise distrust of human hubris.

The political orientation of the universities is another manifestation of
^conflicting visions of human potential. Adherents of the Tragic Vision distrust
..knowledge stated in explicitly articulated and verbally justified propositions,
which is the stock-in-trade of academics, pundits, and policy analysts. Instead
they trust knowledge that is distributed diffusely throughout a system (such as
a market economy or set of social mores) and which is tuned by adjustments
by many simple agents using feedback from the world. (Cognitive.scientists
will be reminded of the distinction between symbolic representations and dis¬
tributed neural networks, and that is no coincidence: Hayek, the foremost ad¬
vocate of distributed intelligence in societies, was an early neural network
modeler.)" For much of the twentieth century, political conservatism had an
anti-intellectual streak, until conservatives decided to play catch-up in the bat¬
tle for hearts and minds and funded policy think tanks as a counterweight to
universities.

Finally, the disagreements on crime and war fall right out of the conflict¬
ing theories of human nature. Given the obvious waste and cruelty of war,
those with the Utopian Vision see it as a kind of pathology that arises from
misunderstandings, shortsightedness, and irrational passions. War is to be
prevented by public expressions of pacifist sentiments, better communication
between potential enemies, less saber-rattling rhetoric, fewer weapons and
military alliances, a de-emphasis on patriotism, and negotiating to avert war at
any cost. Adherents of the Tragic Vision, with their cynical view of human na¬
ture, see war as a rational and tempting strategy for people who think they can
gain something for themselves or their nation. The calculations might be mis¬
taken in any instance, and they may be morally deplorable because they give
no weight to the suffering of the losers, but they are not literally pathological

292/Hot Buttons

or irrational. Oa the only way to ensure peace is to raise the cost af

war to potential aggressors by developing weaponry) arousing patriotism, re¬
warding bravery, flaunting one’s might and resolve, and negotiating from
strength to deter blackmail.

The same arguments divide the visions on crime. Those with the Utopian
Vision see crime as inherently irrational and seek to prevent it by identifying
the root causes. Those with the Tragic Vision see crime as inherently rational
and believe that the root cause is all too obvious: people rob banks because
that’s where the money is. The most effective crime-prevention programs,
they say, strike directly at the rational incentives. A high probability of un¬
pleasant punishment raises the anticipated cost of crime. A public emphasis
on personal responsibility helps enforce the incentives by closing any loop¬
holes left open by the law. And strict parenting practices allow children to in¬
ternalize these contingencies early in life. 19

AND ONTO THIS battlefield strode an innocent E. O. Wilson. The ideas from
evolutionary biology and behavioral genetics that became public in the 1970s
could not have been more of an insult to those with the Utopian Vision. That
vision was, after all, based on the Blank Slate (no permanent human nature),
the Noble Savage (no selfish or evil instincts), and the Ghost in the Machine
(an unfettered “we” that can choose better social arrangements). And here
were scientists talking about selfish genes! And saying that adaptations are not
for the good of the species but for the good of individuals and their kin (as if
to vindicate Thatcher’s claim that "there is no such thing as society"). That
people scrimp on altruism because it is vulnerable to cheaters. That in pre¬
state societies men go to war even when they are well fed, because status and
women are permanent Darwinian incentives. That the moral sense is riddled
with biases, including a tendency to self-deception. And that conflicts of ge¬
netic interest are built in to social animals and leave US in a state of permanent
tragedy. It looked i ng^fp

! .wrong.

The Utopians, particularly those in the radical science movement, replied
that currertt findings on human intelligence and motivation are irrelevant.
They can tell us only about what we have achieved in today’s society, not what
we might achieve in tomorrow's. Since we know that social arrangements can
change if we decide to change them, any scientist who speaks of constraints on
human nature must wont oppression and injustice to continue.

. My own view is that the new sciences of human nature really do vindicate
some version of the Tragic Vision and undermine the Utopian outlook that
until recently dominated large segments of intellectual life. The sciences say
nothing, of course, about differences in values that are associated with partic¬
ular right-wing and left-wing positions (such as in the tradeoffs between

Politics / 293

unemployment and environmental protection, diversity and economic effi¬
ciency, or individual freedom and community cohesion). Nor do they speak
directly to policies that are based on a complex mixture of assumptions about
the world. But they do speak to the parts of the visions that are general claims
about how the mind works. Those claims may be evaluated against the facts,
just like any empirical hypothesis. The Utopian vision that human nature
might radically change in some imagined society of the remote future is, of
course, literally unfalsifiable, but I think that many of the discoveries re¬
counted in preceding chapters make it unlikely. Among them I would include
the following:

• The primacy of family ties in all human societies and the consequent ap¬
peal of nepotism and inheritance."

• The limited scope of communal sharing in human groups, the more com¬
mon ethos of reciprocity, and the resulting phenomena of social loafing
and the collapse of contributions to public goods when reciprocity cannot
be implemented."

• The universality of dominance and violence across human societies (in¬
cluding supposedly peaceable hunter-gatherers) and the existence of ge¬
netic and neurological mechanisms that underlie it. 22

• The universality of ethnocentrism and other forms of group-against-
group hostility across societies, and the ease with which such hostility can
be aroused in people within our own society .23

• The partial heritability of intelligence, conscientiousness, and antisocial
tendencies, implying that some degree of inequality will arise even in per¬
fectly fair economic systems, and that we therefore face an inherent trade¬
off between equality and freedom."

• The prevalence of defense mechanisms, self-serving biases, and cognitive
dissonance reduction, by which people deceive themselves about their au¬
tonomy, wisdom, and integrity."

• The biases of the human moral sense, including a preference for kin and
friends, a susceptibility to a taboo mentality, and a tendency to confuse
morality with conformity, rank, cleanliness, and beauty."

It is not just conventional scientific data that tell us the mind is not infi¬
nitely malleable. I think it is no coincidence that beliefs that were common
among intellectuals in the 1960s-thatdemocracies are obsolete, revolution is
desirable, the police and armed forces dispensable, and society designable
from the top down-are now rarer. The Tragic Vision and the Utopian Vision
inspired historical events whose interpretations are much clearer than they
were just a few decades ago. Those events can serve as additional data to test
the visions' claims about human psychology.

294 / Hot Buttons

The Visions contrast most sharply in the political revolutions

spawned .gf he first revolution with a Utopiart Visiotr v^S the £

tion-recall Wordsworth's description of the times, with «human nature
seeming born again." The revolution overthrew the ancien regime and sought
to begin from scratch with the ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity and a
belief that salvation would come from vesting authority in a morally superior
breed of leaders. The revolution, of course, sent one leader after another to the
guillotine as each failed to measure up to usurpers who felt they had a stronger
claim to wisdom and virtue. No political structure survived the turnover of
personnel, leaving a vacuum that would be filled by Napoleon. The Russian
Revolution Vjf^S also animated by the Utopian Vision, and it also burned
through a succession of leaders before settling into the personality cult of
Stalin. The.Chinese Revolution, too, put its faith in the benevolence and wis¬
dom of a man who displayed, if anything, a particularly strong dose of human
foibles like dominance, lust, and self-deception. The perennial limitations of
human nature prove the futility of political revolutions based only on the
moral aspirations of the revolutionaries. In the words of the song about revo¬
lution by The Who: Meet the new boss; same as the old boss.

Sowell points out that Marxism is a hybrid of the two visions." It invokes
the Tragic Vision to interpret the past, when earlier modes of production left
no choice but the forms of social organization known as feudalism and capi¬
talism. But it invokes a Utopian Vision for the future, in which we can shape
our nature in dialectical interaction with the material and social environment.
In that new world, people will be motivated by self-actualization rather than
self-interest, allowing us to realize the ideal, «From each according to his abil¬
ities, to each according to his needs." Marx wrote that a communist society
would be

the genuine resolutionofthe antagonism between man and nature,and
between man and man; it is the tt|ie resolutiorrofthe conflict between
'existence and essence, objectification and self-affirmation, freedom and
necessity, individual and species. It is the riddle ef history solved. P

It doesn't get any less tragic or more utopian than that. Marx dismissed the
worry that selfishness and dominance would corrupt those carrying out the
general will. For example, he waved off the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin's fear
that the workers in charge would become despotic: «If Mr. Bakunin were fa¬
miliar just with the position of a manager in a workers' cooperative, he could
send all his nightmares about authority to the devil."?

In the heyday of radical science, any proposal about human nature that
conflicted with the Marxist vision was dismissed as self-evidently wrong. But
history is a kind of experiment, albeit an imperfectly controlled one, and its

Politics / 295

data suggest that it was the radical assessment that got it wrong. Marxism is
now almost universally recognized as an experiment that failed, at least in its
worldly implementations.!" The nations that adopted it either collapsed, gave
it up, or languish in backward dictatorships. As we saw in earlier chapters, the
ambition to remake human nature turned its leaders into totalitarian despots
and mass murderers. And the assumption that central planners were morally
disinterested and cognitively competent enough to direct an entire economy
led to comical inefficiencies with serious consequences. Even the more hu¬
mane forms of European socialism have been watered down to the point
where so-called Communist Parties have platforms that not long ago would
have been called reactionary. IlifisOfi, the world's expert on ants, may have Had
the last laugh in his verdict on Marxism: "Wonderful theory. Wrong species.” 31

"Two cheers for democracy," proclaimed E. M. Forster. "Democracy is the
worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried,"
said Winston Churchill. These are encomiums worthy of the Tragic Vision. For
all their flaws, liberal democracies appear to be the best form of large-scale so¬
cial organization our sorry species has come up with so far. They provide more
comfort and freedom, more artistic and scientific vitality, longer and safer
lives, and less disease and pollution than any of the alternatives. Modern
democracies never have famines, almost never wage war on one another, and
are the top choice of people all over the world who vote with their feet or with
their boats. The moderate success of democracies, like the failures of radical
revolutions and of Marxist governments, is now widely enough agreed upon
that it may serve as another empirical test for rival theories of human nature.

The modern concept'of democracy emerged in seventeenth- and eigh¬
teenth-century England and was refined in the frenzy of theorizing that sur¬
rounded the American independence movement. It is no coincidence that the
major theoreticians Of the sociaf contract, such as Hobbes, Locke, and Hume,
^ere atso maior arfnchair psychologists^As Madison wrote, "What is govern¬
ment itself but the greatest of all reflectlbns on human nature?"32

The brains behind the?^anerican Revolution (which is sometimes labeled
with the oxymoron “conservative revolution”) inherited the tragic vision of
thinkers like Hobbes and Hume. (Significantly, the founders appear not to
^havebeen influenced by Rousseau at all, and the popular belief that they got the
\[dea of democracy from the Iroquois Federation is just 1960s granola. )34 The
legal scholar John McGinnis has argued that their theory of human nature
could have come right out of modern evolutionary psychology." It acknowl¬
edges the desire of individuals to further their interests in the form of an in¬
alienable right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit ofhappiness:' The state emerges
from an agreement instituted to protect those rights, rather than being the em¬
bodiment of an autonomous superorganism. Rights need to be protected be-

296/ Hot Buttons

cause when people live together their different talents and circumstances will
lead someofthemto possess things that others want. ("Men have different and
unequal faculties for acquiring property;' noted Madison.)" There are two
ways to get something you want from other people: steal it or trade for it. The
first involves the psychology of dominance; the second, the psychology of re¬
ciprocal altruism. The goal of a peaceful and prosperous society is to minimize
the use of dominance, which leads to violence and waste, and to maximize the
use of reciprocity, which leads to gains in trade that make everyone better off.

The Constitution, McGinnis shows, was consciously designed to imple¬
ment these goals. It encouraged reciprocal exchanges through the Commerce
Clause, which authorized Congress to remove barriers to trade imposed by the
states. It protected them from the danger of cheaters through the Contracts
Clause, which prevented states from impairing the enforcement of contracts.
And it precluded rulers from confiscating the fruits of the more productive
citizens via the Takings Clause, which forbids the government to expropriate
private property without compensation.

The feature of human nature that most impressed the framers was the
drive for dominance and esteem, which, theyfeared. imperils all forms of gov¬
ernment. Someone mast be empowered to make decisions and enforce law^
and that someone is inherently vulnerable to corruption. How to anticipate
and limit that corruption became an obsession of the framers. John Adams
wrote, "The desire for the esteem of-others is as real a want of nature as hunger.
It is the principal end of government to regulate this passion."? Alexander
Hamilton wrote, "The love of fame [is] the ruling passion of the noblest
minds.?" James Madison wrote, “If men were angels, no government would be
necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls
on government would be necessary."?

So external and internal controls there would be. "Parchment barriers;'
said Madison, were not enough; rather, "ambition must be made to counteract
ambition."? Checks and balances were instituted to stalemate any faction that
grew too powerful. They included the division of authority between federal
and state governments, the separation of powers among the executive, legisla¬
tive, and judiciary branches, and the splitting ofthe legislative branch into two
houses.

P

Madison was especially adamant that the Constitution rein in the part of
human nature that encourages war, which is not a primitive lust for blood, he
claimed, but an advanced lust for esteem:

War is in fact the true nurse of executive aggrandizement. In war a phys¬
ical force is created, and it is the executive will to direct it. ||i war the :

m dispense them. |n war the honors and emoluments 'of office are to be

Politics / 297

multiplied; and it is the executive patronage under which they are to be
enjoyed.lt is in war finally that laurels are to be gathered, and it is the ex¬
ecutive brow they are to encircle. The strongest passions and the most
dangerous weakness of the human breast-ambition, avarice, vanity,
the honorable or venial love of fame-are all in conspiracy against the
desire and duty ofpeace."

This inspired the War Powers Clause, which gave Congress, not the president,
the power to declare war. (It was infamously circumvented in the years of the
Vietnam conflict, during which Johnson and Nixon never formally declared a
state of war.)

McGinnis notes that even the freedoms of speech, assembly, and the press
were motivated by features of human nature. The framers justified them as
means of preventing tyranny: a network of freely communicating citizens can
counteract the might of the individuals in government. As we now say, they
can "speak truth to power:' The dynamic of power sharing protected by these
rights might go way back in evolutionary history. The primatologists Frans de
Waal, Robin Dunbar, and Christopher Boehm have shown how a coalition of
fc»wer-ranking primates caadepose.a single alpha rnaler" Like McGinnis, they
Suggest this tMy be a crude analogue of political democracy.

None of this means that the American Constitution was a guarantee of a
happy and moral society, of course. By working within the glaringly under¬
sized moral circle of the day, the Constitution failed to stand in the way of the
genocide of native peoples, the slavery and segregation of African Americans,
and the disenfranchisement of women. It said little about the conduct of for¬
eign affairs, which (except with regard to strategic allies) has generally been
guided by a cynical realpolitik. The first failing has been addressed by explicit
measures to expand the legal circle, such as the Equal Protection clause of the
Fourteenth Amendment; the second is unsolved and perhaps unsolvable, be¬
cause other countries are necessarily outside any circle delineated by a na¬
tional document. The Constitution also lacked any principled compassion for
those at the bottom of the meritocracy, assuming that equality of opportunity
was the only mechanism needed to address the distribution of wealth. And it
is incapable of stipulating the suite of values and customs that appear to be
necessary for a democracy to function in practice.

Acknowledging the relative success of constitutional democracy does not
require one to be a flag-waving patriot. But it does suggest that something may
have been right about the theory of human nature that guided its architects.

The left needs a new paradigm.

-Peter Singer,A Darwinian Left (1999) 43

298/ Plot Buttons

Conservatives need Charles Darwin.

-Larry Arnhart, "Conservatives)Design) and Darwin" (2000)44

What's going on? That voices of the contemporary left and the contempo¬
rary right are both embracing evolutionary psychology after decades of revil¬
ing it shows two things. One is that biological facts are beginning to box in
plausible political philosophies. The belief on the left that human nature can
be changed at will, and the belief on the right that morality rests on God's en¬
dowing us with an immaterial soul, are becoming rearguard struggles against
the juggernaut of science. A popular bumper sticker in the 1990s urged) ques¬
tion authority. Another bumper sticker replied) question gravity. All po¬
litical philosophies have to decide when their arguments are turning into the
questioning of gravity.

The second development is that an acknowledgment of human nature can
no longer be associated with the political right. Once the Utopian Vision is laid
to rest) the field of political positions is wide open. The Tragic Vision) after all)
has not been vindicated in anything like its most lugubrious form. For all its
selfishness, the human mind is equipped with a moral sense) whose circle of
application has expanded steadily and might continue to expand as more of
the world becomes interdependent. And for all its limitations) human cogni¬
tion is an open-ended combinatorial system, which in principle can increase
its mastery over human affairs) just as it has increased its mastery of the phys¬
ical and living worlds.

Traditions) for their part) are adapted not to human nature alone but
to human nature in the context of an infrastructure of technology and eco¬
nomic exchange (one does not have to be a Marxist to accept this insight from
Marx). Some traditional institutions) like families and the rule of law, maybe
adapted to eternal features of human psychology. , ^©th6fSj SUch v lfS
ture, were obviouslyadapted to the dernandsofa feudal system that required
keeping the family lands intact, and became obsolete when the economic sys¬
tem changed in the wake ofindustrializaticnslvlore recently) feminism was in
part a response to improved reproductive technologies and the shift to a ser¬
vice economy. Because social conventions are not adapted to human nature
alone) a respect for human nature does not require preserving all of them.

For these reasons I think political beliefs will increasingly cut across the
centuries-old divide between the Tragic and Utopian IBliwif . They will di¬
verge by invoking different aspects of human nature, by giving different
weightings to conflicting goals) or by offering different assessments of the
likely outcomes of particular courses of action.

I end the chapter with a tour of some thinkers on the left who are scram¬
bling the traditional alignment between, human nature and right-wing

Politics / 299

politics. As its title suggests, A Darwinian Leftis the most systematic attempt
to map out the new alignment.f Singer writes, " It is time for the left to take se¬
riously the fact that we are evolved animals, and that we bear the evidence of
our inheritance, not only in our anatomy and our DNA, but in our behavior
toO:'46 For Singer this means acknowledging the limits of human nature,
which makes the perfectibility of humankind an impossible goal. And it
means acknowledging specific components of human nature. They include
self-interest, which implies that competitive economic systems will work bet¬
ter than state monopolies; the drive for dominance, which makes powerful
governments vulnerable to overweening autocrats; ethnocentrism, which puts
nationalist movements at risk of committing discrimination and genocide;
and differences between the sexes, which should temper measures for rigid
gender parity in all walks of life.

So what's left ofthe left? an observer might ask. Singer replies, "Ifwe shrug
our shoulders at the avoidable suffering of the weak and the poor, of those
who are getting exploited and ripped off, or who simply do not have enough
to sustain life at a decent level, we are not ofthe left. If we say that that is just
the way the world is, and always will be, and there is nothing we can do about
it, we are not part ofthe left. The left wants to do something about this situa¬
tion."? Singer's leftism, like traditional leftism, is defined by a contrast with a
defeatist Tragic Vision. But its goal-"doing something"-has been down¬
sized considerably from Robert Kennedy's goal in the 1960s of "building a new
world society."

The Darwinian left has ranged from vague 'expressions of values to wonk-
ish policy initiatives. We have already met two theoreticians at the vaguer end.
Chomsky has been the most vocal defender of an innate cognitive endowment
since he nailed his thesis of an inborn language faculty to the behaviorists'
door in the late 1950s. He has also been a fierce left-wing critic ofAmerican so¬
ciety and has recently inspired a whole new generation of campus radicals (as
we saw in his interview with Rage Against the Machine). Chomsky insists that
the connections between his science and his politics are slender but real:

A vision of a future social order is ... based on a concept of human na¬
ture. If, in fact, man is an indefinitely malleable, completely plastic
being, with no innate structures of mind and no intrinsic needs of a cul¬
tural or social character, then he is a fit subject for the "shaping of behav¬
ior" by the State authority, the corporate manager, the technocrat, or the
central committee. Those with some confidence in the human species
will hope this is not so and will try to determine the intrinsic character¬
istics that provide the framework for intellectual development, the
growth of moral consciousness, cultural achievement, and participation
in a free community."

300/ Hot Buttons

He describes his political vision as "libertarian socialist" and "anarcho-syndi¬
calist," the kind of anarchism that values spontaneous cooperation (as opposed
to anarcho-capitalism, the kind that values individualisml." This vision, he
suggests, lies in a Cartesian tradition that includes "Rousseau's opposition to
tyranny, oppression, and established authority, ... Kant's defense of freedom,
Humboldt's precapitalist liberalism with its emphasis on the basic human need
for free creation under conditions ofvoluntary association, and Marx's critique
of alienated fragmented labor that turns men into machines, depriving them of
their (species character' of'free conscious activity' and (productive life' in asso¬
ciation with their fellows,"!" Chomsky's political beliefs, then, resonate with his
scientific beliefthat humans are innately endowed with a desire for community
and a drive for creative free expression, language being the paradigm example.
That holds out the hope for a society organized by cooperation and natural
productivity rather than by hierarchical control and the profit motive.

Chomsky’s theory of hllman natufej thotigh st ^ tist, is innocent

of modern evolutionary biology with its demonstration ’ iqffitdus con-
fliets of genetic interest. These conflicts lead to a darker view of human nature,
one that has always been a headache for those with anarchist dreams. But the
thinker who first elucidated these conflicts, Robert was a left-wing

radical as well, and one of the rare white Black Panthers. As we saw in Chapter
6, 'feivirs soek>biolQfly as,a to con¬

flicts of interest can illuminate the interests of repressed agents, such as
women and younger generations, and it can expose the deception and self-
deception that elites use to justify their dominance." In that wayjfiSciobiology

follows ki t_ _

eason was used in Locke's time to question the
divine right of kings, and maybe used in our time to question the pretension
that current political arrangements serve everyone's interests.

Though it may come as a shock to many people, the use of IQ tests and a
recognition of innate differences in intelligence can support-and in the past
did support-left-wing political goals. In his article "Bell Curve Liberals:' the
journalist Adrian Wooldridge points out that I

British .e ultimate W&teTteT of a <

tdass twi s, gether with other liberals an 'socialists, Sidney and Beatnce
Webb hoped to turn the educational system into a "capacity-catching ma¬
chine" that could "rescue talented poverty from the shop or the plough" and
direct them into the ruling elite. They were opposed by conservatives such as
T. S. Eliot, who worried that a system that sorts people by ability would disor¬
ganize civil society by breaking the bonds of class and tradition at both ends
of the ladder. At one end it would _ di¬
viding them by talent. At the other it WOuldaROT^Ve efjfedf flbbfessfe Hge

fpbfcn theupper clag&eywho now would have “eamad”thejr success arid 5 be

Politics / 301

responsible to no one, rather than inheriting it and being obligated to help the
less fortunate. Wooldridge argues that "the left can hardly afford to ignore LQ.
tests, which, for all their inadequacies, are still the best means yetdevised for
spotting talent wherever it occurs, in the inner cities as well as the plush hous¬
ing estates, and ensuring that talent is matched to the appropriate educational
streams and job opportunities."

For their part, Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray (the authors of
The Bell Curve) argued that the heritability of intelligence ought to galvanize
the left into a greater commitment to Rawlsian social justice. 53 If intelligence
were entirely acquired, then policies for equal opportunity would suffice to
guarantee an equitable distribution of wealth and power. But if some souls
have the misfortune of being born into brains with lower ability, they could
fall into poverty through no fault of their own, even in a perfectly fair system
of economic competition. If social justice consists of seeing to the well-being
of the worst off, then recognizing genetic differences calls for an active redis¬
tribution of wealth. Indeed, though Herrnstein was a conservative and Murray
a right-leaning libertarian and communitarian, they were not opposed to sim¬
ple redistributive measures such as a negative income tax for the lowest wage
earners, which would give a break to those who play by the rules but still can't
scrape by. Murray's libertarianism leads him to oppose government programs
that are more activist than that, but he and Herrnstein noted that a hereditar-
ian left is a niche waiting to be filled.

An important challenge to conservative political theory has come from
behavioral economists such as Richard Thaler and George Akerlof, who were
influenced by the evolutionary cognitive psychology of Herbert Simon, Amos
Tversky, Daniel Kahneman, Gerd Gigerenzer, and Paul Slovic." These psy¬
chologists have argued that human thinking and decision making are biologi¬
cal adaptations rather than engines of pure rationality. These mental systems
work with limited amounts of information, have to reach decisions in a finite
amount of time, and ultimately serve evolutionary goals such as status and se¬
curity. Conservatives have always invoked limitations on human reason to rein
inthe pretense that we can understand social behavior well enough to redesign
society. But those limitations also undermine the assumption of rational self-
interest that underlies classical economics and secular conservatism. Ever
since Adam Smith, classical economists have argued that in the absence of out¬
side interference, individuals making decisions in their own interests will do
what is best for themselves and for society. But if people do not always calcu¬
late what is best for themselves, they might be.better off with the taxes and
regulations that classical economists find so perverse.

For example, rational agents informed by interest rates and their life ex¬
pectancies should save the optimal proportion of their wages for comfort in
their old age. Social security and mandatory savings plans should be unneces-

302 /Hot Buttons

sary-indeed, harmful-because they take away choice and hence the oppor¬
tunity to find the best balance between consuming now and saving for the fu¬
ture. But economists repeatedly find that people spend their money like

drunken sailors. They act as if they think they will die in a few years, or as if the
future is completely unpredictable, which may be closer to the reality of our
evolutionary ancestors than it is to life today. 55 If so, then allowing people to
manage their own savings (for example, letting them keep their entire pay-
check and investing it as they please) may work against their interests. Like
Odysseus approaching the island of the Sirens, people might rationally agree
to let their employer or the government tie them to the mast of forced savings.

The economist Robert Frank has appealed to the evolutionary psychology
of status to point out other shortcomings of the rational-actor theory and, by
extension, laissez-faire economics.56 Rational actors should eschew not only
forced retirement savings but other policies that ostensibly protect them, such
as mandatory health benefits, workplace safety regulations, unemployment
insurance, and union dues. All of these cost money that would otherwise go
into their paychecks, and workers could decide for themselves whether to take
a pay cut to work for a company with the most paternalistic policies or go for
the biggest salary and take higher risks on the job. Companies, in their com¬
petition for the best employees, should find the balance demanded by the em¬
ployees they want.

The rub, Frank points out, is that people are endowed with a craving for
statUS.1Their first impulse is to spend money in ways that put themselves ahead
of the Ioneses ( houses, cars, clothing, prestigious educations), rather than in
ways that only they know about (health care, job safety, retirement savings).
Unfortunately. is a zerft-snm gam|i , so when everyone has more money

to spend on cars and houses, the houses and cars get bigger but people are no
happier than they were before. Like hockey players who agree to wear helmets
only if a rule forces their opponents to wear them too, people might agree to
regulations that force everyone to pay for hidden benefits like health care that
make them happier in the long run, even if the regulations come at the expense
of disposable income. For the same reason, Frank argues, we would be better
off if we implemented a steeply graduated tax on consumption, replacing the
curr ed o e. A consump tax would damp down the

futile arms race!
people with resources that provably increase happiness*

. Finally, Darwinian leftists haw been examining the evolutionary psychoJ-J

ogy of economic inequality. The economists Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gin-
tis, formerly Marxists and now Darwinians, have reviewed the literature from
ethnography and behavioral economics which suggests that people are neithe$
antlike altruists nor self-centered misers.'? As we saw in Chapter 14, people

Politics / 303

share with others who they think are willing to share, and punish those who
are not. (Gintis calls this sttXHlg reciprocity,” which is like reciprocal altruism
or "weak reciprocity» but is aimed at other people's willingness to contribute
to public goods rather than at tit-for-tat exchanges.)" This psychology makes
people oppose indiscriminate welfare and expansive social programs not be¬
cause they are callous or greedy but because they think such programs reward
the indolent and punish the industrious. Bowles and Gintis note that even in
today’s supposedly antiwelfare climate, polls showthat most people are willing
to pay higher taxes for some kinds of universal social insurance. They are will¬
ing to pay to guarantee basic needs such as food, shelter, and health care, to aid
the victims ofbad luck, and to help people who are down and out become self-
sufficient. Mother words, people are opposed to a blanket welfare state not out
of greed but out of fairness. A welfare system that did not try to rewrite the
public consciousness, and which distinguished between the deserving and the
undeserving poor, would, they argue, be perfectly consonant with human na¬
ture.

The politics of economic inequality ultimately hinge on a tradeoff be¬
tween economic freedom and economic equality. Though scientists cannot
dictate how these desiderata should be weighted, they can help assess the
morally relevant costs and thereby enable us to make a more informed deci¬
sion. Once again the psychology of status and dominance has a role to play in
this assessment. In absolute terms, today’s poor are materially better off than
the aristocracy of just a century ago. They live longer, are better fed, and enjoy
formerly unimaginable luxuries such as central heating, refrigerators, tele¬
phones, and round-the-clock entertainment from television and radio. Con¬
servatives say this makes it hard to argue that the station of lower-income
people is an ethical outrage that ought to be redressed at any cost. ,

But if people's sense of well-being comes from an assessment of their so-
;cialstatus, and social status is relative, the extreme inequality can make peo-
fteon the lower rungs feel cfefcit£d if they are better off than most of
bumafufy S is not just a matter of hurt feelings: people with lower status are
less healthy and die younger, and communities with greater'inequality have
poorer health and shorter life expectancies .59 The medical researcher Richard
Wilkinson, who documented these patterns, argues that low status triggers an
ancient stress reaction that sacrifices tissue repair and immune function for an
immediate fight-or-flight response. Wilkinson, together with Martin Daly and

Margo Wilson, have pointed to another measurable cost of economic inequal¬
ity. Crime rates are much higher in regions with greater disparities of wealth
(even after controlling for absolute levels of wealth), partly because dironic

and to kill one another

er trivial insults, If Wilkinsonargues that reducing economic inequality

would make millions of lives happier, safer, and longer.

304 / Hot Buttons

This well-populated gallery of left-wing innatists should not come as a
surprise, even after centuries in which human nature was a preserve of the
right. Mindful both of science and of history, the Darwinian left has aban¬
doned the Utopian Vision that brought so many unintended disasters.
Whether this non-Utopian left is really all that different from the contempo¬
rary secular right, and whether its particular policies are worth their costs, is
not for me to argue here. The point is that traditioaskpolitical alignments
oygtjl to change as we learn more abouthuman beings. The ideologies of the
left and the right took shape before Darwin, before Mendel, before anyone
knew what a gene or a neuron or a hormone was. Every student of political sci¬
ence is taught that political ideologies are based on theories of human nature.
Why must they be based on theories that are three hundred years out of date?

Politics / 305

Chapter 17

Violence

The story of the human race is war. Except for brief and precarious in¬
terludes there has never been peace in the world; and long before history
began murderous strife was universal and unending.'

WINSTON CHURCHILL’S SUMMARY of our species could be dismissed as the
pessimism of a man who fought history's most awful war and was present at
the birth of a cold war that could have destroyed humanity altogether. In fact
it has sadly stood the test of time. Though the cold war is a memory, and hot
wars between major nations are rare, we still do not have peace in the world.
Even before the infamous year of2001, with its horrific terrorist attacks on the
United States and subsequent war in Afghanistan, the World Conflict List cata¬
logued sixty-eight areas of systematic violence, from Albania and Algeria
through Zambia and Zimbabwe.'

Churchill's speculation about prehistory has also been borne out. Modern
foragers, who offer a glimpse of life in prehistoric societies, were once thought
to engage only in ceremonial battles that were called to a halt as soon as the first
man fell. Now they are known to kill one another at rates that dwarf the casu¬
alties from our world wars.' The archaeological record is no happier. Buried in
the ground and hidden in caves lie silent witnesses to a bloody prehistory
stretching back hundreds of thousands of years. They include skeletons with
scalping marks, ax-shaped dents, and arrowheads embedded in them; weapons
like tomahawks and maces that are useless for hunting but specialized for
homicide; fortification defenses such as palisades of sharpened sticks; and
paintings from several continents showing men firing arrows, spears, or
boomerangs at one another and being felled by these weapons." For decades,
"anthropologists of peace" denied that any human group had ever practiced
cannibalism, but evidence to the contrary has been piling up and now includes
a smoking gun. In an 8S0-year-old site in the American Southwest, archaeolo¬
gists have found human bones that were hacked up like the bones of animals

306 /Hot Buttons

used for food. They also found traces ofhuman myoglobin (a muscle protein)
on pot shards, and-damningly-in a lump of fossilized human excrement.'
Members of Homo antecessor, relatives of the common ancestor of Neander¬
thals and modern humans, bashed and butchered one another too, suggesting
that violence and cannibalism go back at least 800,000 years."

War is only one of the ways in which people kill other people. In much of
the world, war shades into smaller-scale violence such as ethnic strife, turfbat-
ties, blood feuds, and individual homicides. Here too, despite undeniable im¬
provements, we do not have anything like peace. Though Western societies
have seen murder rates fall between tenfold and a hundredfold in the past mil¬
lennium, the United States lost a million people to homicide in the twentieth
century, and an American man has about a one- half percent lifetime chance of
being murdered,"

History indicts our species not just with the number of killings but with
the manner. Hundreds of millions of Christians decorate their homes and
adorn their bodies with a facsimile of a device that inflicted an unimaginably
agonizing death on people who were a nuisance to Roman politicians. It isjust
one example of the endless variations of torture that the human mind has de¬
vised over the millennia, many of them common enough to have become
words in our lexicon: to crucify, to draw ancl quarter, toflay, to press, to stone; the
garrote, the rack, the stake, the thumbscrew. Dostoevsky's Ivan Karamazov,
learning of the atrocities committed by the Turks in Bulgaria, said, "No animal
could ever be so cruel as a man, so artfully, so artistically cruel." The annual re¬
ports of Amnesty International show that artistic cruelty is by no means a
thing of the past.

THE REDUCTION OF violence on scales large and small is one of our greatest
moral concerns. We ought to use every intellectual tool available to under¬
stand what it is about the human mind and human social arrangements that
leads people to hurt and kill so much. But as with the other moral concerns ex¬
amined in this part of the book, the effort to figure out what is going on has
been hijacked by an effort to legislate the correct answer. In the case of vio¬
lence, the correct answer is that violence has nothing to do with human nature
but is a pathology inflicted by malign elements outside us. Violence is a behav¬
ior taught by the culture, or an infectious disease endemic to certain environ¬
ments.

This hypothesis has become the central dogma of a secular faith, repeat¬
edly avowed in public proclamations like a daily prayer or pledge of alle¬
giance. Recall Ashley Montagu's UNESCO resolution that biology supports an
ethic of "universal brotherhood" and the anthropologists who believed that
"nonviolence and peace were likely the norm throughout most of human pre¬
history." In the 1980s, many social science organizations endorsed the Seville

Violence / 307

Statement, which declared that it is "scientifically incorrect" to say that hu¬
mans have a "violent brain" or have undergone selection for violence." "War is
not an instinct but an invention:' wrote Ortega y Gasset, paralleling his claim
that man has no nature but only history," A recent United Nations Declaration
on the Elimination of Violence Against Women announced that "violence is
part of an historical process, and is not natural or born of biological deter¬
minism." A 1999 ad by the National Funding Collaborative on Violence Pre¬
vention declared that "violence is learned behavior,"!"

Another sign of this faith-based approach to violence is the averred cer¬
tainty that particular environmental explanations are correct. We know the
causes of violence, it is repeatedly said, and we also know how to eliminate it.
Only a failure of commitment has prevented us from doing so. Remember
Lyndon Johnson saying that "all of us know" that the conditions that breed
violence are ignorance, discrimination, poverty, and disease. A 1997 article
on violence in a popular science magazine quoted a clinical geneticist who
echoed LBJ:

We know what causes violence in our society: poverty, discrimination,
the failure of our educational system. It's not the genes that cause vio¬
lence in our society. It's our social system. 11

The authors of the article, the historians Betty and Daniel Kevles, agreed:

We need better education, nutrition, and intervention in dysfunctional
homes and in the lives of abused children, perhaps to the point of re¬
moving them from the control of their incompetent parents. But such
'responses would be expensive and socially controversial. 12

The creed that violence is learned behavior often points to particular ele¬
ments of American culture as the cause. A member of a toy-monitoring group
recently told a reporter, "Violence is a learned behavior. Every toy is educa¬
tional. The question is, what do you want your children to learn?" 13 Media vi¬
olence is another usual suspect. As two public health experts recently wrote:

The reality is that children learn to value and use violence to solve their
problems and deal with strong feelings. They learn it from role models
in their families and communities. They learn it from the heroes we put
in front of them on television, the movies, and video games."

Childhood abuse, recently implicated in Richard Rhodes's Why They Kill,
is a third putative cause. "The tragedy is that people who have been victimized

308 /Hot Buttons

often become victimizes themselves;' said the president of the Criminal Jus¬
tice Policy Foundation. "It's a cycle we could break, but it involves some ex¬
pense. As a society, we haven't put our resources there."15 Note in these
statements the mouthing of the creed ("Violence is a learned behavior"), the
certainty that it is true ("The reality is"), and the accusation that we suffer
from a lack ofcommitment ("We haven't put our resources there") rather than
an ignorance of how to solve the problem.

Many explanations blame "culture;' conceived as a superorganism that
teaches, issues commands, and doles out rewards and punishments. A Boston
Globe columnist must have been oblivious to the circularity of his reasoning
when he wrote:

So why is America more violent than other industrialized Western
democracies? It's our cultural predisposition to violence. We pummel
each other, maul each other, stab each other and shoot each other be¬
cause it's our cultural imperative to do so .16

When culture is seen as an entity with beliefs and desires, the beliefs and de¬
sires of actual people are unimportant. After Timothy McVeigh blew up a fed¬
eral office building in Oklahoma City in 1995, killing 168 people, the
journalist Alfie Kohn ridiculed Americans who "yammer about individual re¬
sponsibility" and attributed the bombing to American individualism: "We
have a cultural addiction to competition in this country. We're taught in class¬
rooms and playing fields that other people are obstacles to our own success."?
A related explanation for the bombing put the blame on American symbols,
such as the arrow-clutching eagle on the national seal, and state mottoes, in¬
cluding "Live Free or Die" (New Hampshire) and "With the sword, we seek
peace, but under liberty" (Massachusetts).18

A popular recent theory attributes American violence to a toxic and pecu¬
liarly American conception of maleness inculcated in childhood. The social
psychologist Alice Eagly explained sprees of random shootings by saying,
"This sort of behavior has been part of the male role as it has been construed
in US culture, from the frontier tradition on." 19 According to the theory, pop¬
ularized in bestsellers like Dan Kindlon's Raising Cain and William Pollack's
Real Boys, we are going through a "national crisis of boyhood in America;'
caused by the fact that boys are forced to separate from their mothers and sti¬
fle their emotions. "What's the matter with men?" asked an article in the
Boston Globe Magazine. "Violent behavior, emotional distance, and higher
rates of drug addiction can't be explained by hormones;' it answers. "The
problem, experts say,is cultural beliefs about masculinity-everything packed
into the phrase 'a real man; "20

Violence / 309

THE STATEMENT THAT «violence is learned behavior" is a mantra repeated by
right-thinking people to show that they believe that violence should be re¬
duced. It is not based on any sound research. The sad fact is that despite the re¬
peated assurances that «weknow the conditions that breed violence:' we barely
have a clue. Wild swings in crime rates-up in the 1960s and late 1980s,down
in the late 1990s-continue to defy any simple explanation. And the usual sus¬
pects for understanding violence are completely unproven and sometimes
patently false. This is most blatant in the case of factors like "nutrition" and
«disease" that are glibly thrown into lists of the social ills that allegedly bring
on violence. There is no evidence, to put it mildly, that violence is caused by a
vitamin deficiency or a bacterial infection. But the other putative causes suffer
from a lack of evidence as well.

Aggressive parents often have aggressive children, but people who con¬
clude that aggression is learned from parents in a «cycle of violence" never
consider the possibility that violent tendencies could be inherited as well as
learned. Unless one looks at adopted children and shows that they act more
like their adoptive parents than like their biological parents, cycles of violence
prove nothing. Similarly, the psychologists who note that men commit more
acts of violence than women and then blame it on a culture of masculinity are
wearing intellectual blinkers that keep them from noticing that men and
women differ in their biology as well as in their social roles. American children
are exposed to violent role models, of course, but they are also exposed to
clowns, preachers, folk singers, and drag queens; the question is why children
find some people more worthy of imitation than others.

To show that violence is caused by special themes of American culture, a
bare minimum of evidence would be a correlation in which the cultures that
have those themes also tend to be more violent. Even that correlation, if it ex¬
isted' would not prove that the cultural themes cause the violence rather than
the other way around. But there may be no such correlation in the first place.

To begin with, American culture is not uniquely violent. All societies have
violence, and America is not the most violent one in history or even in today's
world. Most countries in the Third World, and many of the former republics
of the Soviet Union, are considerably more violent, and they have nothing like
the American tradition of individualism." As for cultural norms of masculin¬
ity and sexism, Spain has its machismo, Italy its braggadocio, and Japan its
rigid gender roles, yet their homicide rates are a fraction of that of the more
feminist-influenced United States. The archetype of a masculine hero pre¬
pared to use violence in a just cause is one of the most common motifs in
mythology, and it can be found in many cultures with relatively low rates of vi¬
olent crime. James Bond, for example-who actually has a license to kill-is
British, and martial arts films are popular in many industrialized Asian coun-

310 /Hot Buttons

tries. In any case, only a bookworm who has never actually seen an American
movie or television program could believe that they glorify murderous fanat¬
ics like Timothy McVeigh or teenagers who randomly shoot classmates in high
school cafeterias. Masculine heroes in the mass media are highly moralistic:
they fight bad guys.

Among conservative politicians and liberal health professionals alike it is
an article of faith that violence in the media is a major cause of American vio¬
lent crime. The American Medical Association, the American Psychological
Association, and the American Academy of Pediatrics testified before Con¬
gress that over 3,500 studies had investigated the connection and only 18 failed
to find one. Any social scientist can smell fishy numbers here, and the psy¬
chologist Jonathan Freedman decided to look for himself. In fact, only two
/tintr/rer/studies have looked for a connection between media violence and vi¬
olent behavior, and more than half failed to find one. 22 The others found cor¬
relations that are small and readily explainable in other ways-for example,
that violent children seek out violent entertainment, and that children are
temporarily aroused (but not permanently affected) by action-packed
footage. Freedman and several other psychologists who have reviewed the lit¬
erature have concluded that exposure to media violence has little or no effect
on violent behavior in the world.P Reality checks from recent history suggest
the same thing. People were more violent in the centuries before television and
movies were invented. Canadians watch the same television shows as Ameri¬
cans but have a fourth their homicide rate. When the British colony of St. He¬
lena installed television for the first time in 1995, its people did not become
more violent." Violent computer games took off in the 1990s, a time when
crime rates plummeted.

What about the other usual suspects? Guns, discrimination, and poverty
play a role in violence, but in no case is it a simple or decisive one. Guns surely
make it easier for people to kill, and harder for them to de-escalate a fight be¬
fore a death occurs, and thus multiply the lethality of conflicts large and small.
Nonetheless, many societies had sickening rates of violence before guns were
invented, and people do not automatically kill one another just because they
have access to guns. The Israelis and Swiss are armed to the teeth but have low
rates of violent personal crime, and among American states, Maine and North
Dakota have the lowest homicide rates but almost every home has a gun." The
idea that guns increase lethal crime, though certainly plausible, has been so
difficult to prove that in 1998 the legal scholar John Lott published a book of
statistical analyses with a title that flaunts the opposite conclusion: More Guns,
Less Crime. Even if he is wrong, as I suspect he is, it is not so easy to show that
more guns mean more crime.

As for discrimination and poverty, again it is hard to show a direct cause-
and-effect relationship. Chinese immigrants to California in the nineteenth

Violence / 311

century and Japanese-Americans in World War II faced severe discrimination,
but they did not react with high rates ofviolence. Women are poorer than men
and are more likely to need money to feed children, but they are less likely to
steal things by force. Different subcultures that are equally impoverished can
vary radically in their rates of violence, and as we shall see, in many cultures
relatively affluent men can be quick to use lethal force." Though no one could
object to a well-designed program that was shown to reduce crime, one can¬
not simply blame crime rates on a lack of commitment to social programs.
These programs first flourished in the 1960s, the decade in which rates of vio¬
lent crime skyrocketed.

Scientifically oriented researchers on violence chant a different mantra:
"Violence is a public health problem:' According to the National Institute of
Mental Health, "Violent behavior can best be understood-and prevented-if
it is attacked as if it were a contagious disease that flourishes in vulnerable in¬
dividuals and resource-poor neighborhoods." The public health theory has
been echoed by many professional organizations, such as the American Psy¬
chological Society and the Centers for Disease Control, and by political figures
as diverse as the surgeon general in the Clinton administration and the Re¬
publican senator Arlen Specter." The public health approach tries to identify
"risk factors" that are more common in poor neighborhoods than affluent
ones. They include neglect and abuse in childhood, harsh and inconsistent
discipline, divorce, malnutrition, lead poisoning, head injuries, untreated at¬
tention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and the use of alcohol and crack cocaine
during pregnancy.

Researchers in this tradition are proud that their approach is both "bio¬
logical" -they measure bodily fluids and take pictures of the brain-and "cul-
tural"-they look for environmental causes ofthe brain conditions that might
be ameliorated by the equivalent of public health measures. Unfortunately,
there is a rather glaring flaw in the whole analogy. A good definition of a dis¬
ease or disorder is that it consists of suffering experienced by an individual be¬
cause of a malfunction of a mechanism in the individual's body." But as a
writer for Science recently pointed out, "Unlike most diseases, it's usually not
the perpetrator who defines aggression as a problem; it's the environment. Vi¬
olent people may feel they are functioning normally, and some may even enjoy
their occasional outbursts and resist treatment'?" Other than the truism that
violence is more common in some people and places than others, the public
health theory has little to recommend it. As we shall see, violence is not a dis¬
ease in anything like the medical sense.

PURE ENVIRONMENTAL THEORIES ofviolence remain an article of faith be¬
cause they embody the Blank Slate and the Noble Savage. Violence, according
to these theories, isn't a natural strategy in the human repertoire; it's learned

3 12/Hot Buttons

behavior, or poisoning by a toxic substance, or the symptom of an infectious
illness. In earlier chapters we saw the moral appeal of such doctrines: to differ¬
entiate the doctrine-holders from jingoists of earlier periods and ruffians of
different classes; to reassure audiences that they do not think violence is "nat¬
ural" in the sense of "good"; to express an optimism that violence can be elim¬
inated, particularly by benign social programs rather than punitive
deterrence; to stay miles away from the radioactive position that some indi¬
viduals, classes, or races are innately more violent than others.

Most of all, the learned-behavior and public health theories are moral
declarations, public avowals that the declarer is opposed to violence. Con¬
demning violence is all to the good, of course, but not if it is disguised as an
empirical claim about our psychological makeup. Perhaps the purest example
of this wishful confusion comes from Ramsey Clark, attorney general in the
Johnson administration and the author of the 1970 bestseller Crime in Amer¬
ica. In arguing that the criminal justice system should replace punishment
with rehabilitation, Clark explained:

The theory of rehabilitation is based on the belief that healthy, rational
people will not injure others, that they will understand that the individ¬
ual and his society are best served byconductthat does not inflict injury,
and that ajust society has the ability to provide health and purpose and
opportunity for all its citizens. Rehabilitated, an individual will not have
the capacity-cannot bring himself-to injure another or take or de¬
stroy property. 30

Would that it were so! This theory is a fine example of the moralistic fallacy: it
would be so nice (/the idea were true that we should all believe that it is true.
The problem is that it is not true. History has shown that plenty of healthy, ra¬
tional people can bring themselves to injure others and destroy property be¬
cause, tragically, an individual's interests sometimes preserved by hurting
others (especially if criminal penalties for hurting others are eliminated, an
irony that Clark seems to have missed). Conflicts of interest are inherent to the
human condition, and as Martin Daly and Margo Wilson point out, "Killing
one's adversary is the ultimate conflict resolution technique."!

Admittedly, it is easy to equate health and rationality with morality. The
metaphors pervade the English language, as when we call an evildoer crazy,
degenerate, depraved, deranged, mad, malignant, psycho, sick, or twisted. But the
metaphors are bound to mislead us when we contemplate the causes of vio¬
lence and ways to reduce it. Termites are not malfunctioning when they eat the
wooden beams in houses, nor are mosquitoes when they bite a victim and
spread the malaria parasite. They are doing exactly what evolution designed
them to do, even ifthe outcome makes people suffer. For scientists to moralize

Violence / 313

about these creatures or call their behavior pathological would only send us all
down blind alleys, such as a search for the "toxic" influences on these creatures
or a "cure" that would restore them to health. For the same reason, human vi¬
olence does not have to be a disease for it to be worth combating. If anything,
it is the belief that violence is an aberration that is dangerous, because it lulls
us into forgetting how easily violence may erupt in quiescent places.

The Blank Slate and the Noble Savage owe their support not just to their
moral appeal but to enforcement by ideology police. The blood libel against
Napoleon Chagnon for documenting warfare among the Yanomamo is the
most lurid example ofthe punishment of heretics, but it is not the only one. In
1992 a Violence Initiative in the Alcohol, Drug Abuse, and Mental Health Ad¬
ministration was canceled because of false accusations that the research aimed
to sedate inner-city youth and to stigmatize them as genetically prone to vio¬
lence. (In fact, it advocated the public health approach.) A conference and
book on the legal and moral issues surrounding the biology of violence, which
was to include advocates of all viewpoints, was canceled by Bernadine Healey,
director of the National Institutes of Health, who overruled a unanimous
peer-review decision because of concerns "associated with the sensitivity and
validity ofthe proposed conference."? The university sponsoring the confer¬
ence appealed and won, but when the conference was held three years later,
protesters invaded the hall and, as if to provide material for comedians, began
a shoving match with the participants."

What was everyone so sensitive about? The stated fear was that the gov¬
ernment would define political unrest in response to inequitable social condi¬
tions as a psychiatric disease and silence the protesters by drugging them or
worse. The radical psychiatrist Peter Breggin called the Violence Initiative "the
most terrifying, most racist, most hideous thing imaginable" and "the kind of
plan one would associate with Nazi Germany."34 The reasons included "the
medicalization of social issues, the declaration that the victim of oppression,
in this case the Jew, is in fact a genetically and biologically defective person, the
mobilization of the state for eugenic purposes and biological purposes, the
heavy use ofpsychiatry in the development of social-control programs." 35 This
is a fanciful, indeed paranoid, reading, but Breggin has tirelessly repeated it,
especially to African American politicians and media outlets. Anyone using
the words "violence" and "biology" inthe same paragraph may be put under a
cloud of suspicion for racism, and this has affected the intellectual climate re¬
garding violence. No one has ever gotten into trouble for saying that violence
is completely learned.

THERE ARE MANY reasons to believe that violence in humans is not literally a
sickness or poisoning but part of our design. Before presenting them, let me
allay two fears.

3 14/ Hot Buttons

The first fear is that examining the roots of violence in human nature con¬
sists of reducing violence to the bad genes of violent individuals, with the un¬
savory implication that ethnic groups with higher rates of violence must have
more of these genes.

There can be little doubt that some individuals are constitutionally more
prone to violence than others. Take men, for starters: across cultures, men kill
men twenty to forty times more often than women kill women." And the
lion's share of the killers are young men, between the ages of fifteen and
thirty." Some young men, moreover, are more violent than others. According
to one estimate, 7 percent of young men commit 79 percent of repeated vio¬
lent offenses." Psychologists find that individuals prone to violence have a dis¬
tinctive personality profile. They tend to be impulsive, low in intelligence,
hyperactive, and attention-deficient. They are described as having an "opposi¬
tional temperament": they are vindictive, easily angered, resistant to control,
deliberately annoying, and likely to blame everything on other people." The
most callous among them are psychopaths, people who lack a conscience, and
they make up a substantial percentage of murderers." These traits emerge in
early childhood, persist through the lifespan, and are largely heritable, though
nowhere near completely so.

Sadists, hotheads, and other natural-born killers are part of the problem
of violence, not just because of the harm they wreak but because of the ag¬
gressive posture they force others into for deterrence and self-defense. But my
point here is that they are not the major part of the problem. Wars start and
stop, crime rates yo-yo, societies go from militant to pacifist or vice versa
within a generation, all without any change in the frequencies of the local
genes. Though ethnic groups differ today in their average rates of violence,
the differences do not call for a genetic explanation, because the rate for a
group at one historical period may be matched to that of any other group at
another period. Today's docile Scandinavians descended from bloodthirsty
Vikings, and Africa, wracked by war after the fall of colonialism, is much like
Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire. Any ethnic group that has made it
into the present probably had pugnacious ancestors in the not-too-distant
past.

The second fear is that if people are endowed with violent motives, they
can’t help being violent, or must be violent all the time, like the Tasmanian
Devil in Looney Tunes who tears through an area leaving a swath of destruc¬
tion in his wake. This fear is a reaction to archaic ideas of killer apes, athirst for
blood, a death wish, a territorial imperative, and a violent brain. In fact, if the
brain is equipped with strategies for violence, they are contingent strategies,
connected to complicated circuitry that computes when and where they
should be deployed. Animals deploy aggression in highly selective ways, and
humans, whose limbic systems are enmeshed with outsize frontal lobes, are of

Violence / 315

course even more calculating. Most people today live their adult lives without
ever pressing their violence buttons.

So what is the evidence that our species may have evolved mechanisms for
discretionary violence? The first thing to keep in mind is that aggression is an
organized, goal-directed activity, not the kind of eventthat could come from a
random malfunction. If your lawnmower continued to run after you released
the handle and it injured your foot, you might suspect a sticky switch or other
breakdown. But if the lawnmower lay in wait until you emerged from the
garage and then chased you around the yard, you would have to conclude that
someone had installed a chip that programmed it to do so.

The presence of deliberate chimpicide in our chimpanzee cousins raises
the possibility that the forces of evolution, notjustthe idiosyncrasies of a par¬
ticular human culture, prepared us for violence. And the ubiquity of violence
in human societies throughout history and prehistory is a stronger hint that
we are so prepared.

When we look at human bodies and brains, we find more direct signs of
design for aggression. The larger size, strength, and upper-body mass of men
is a zoological giveaway of an evolutionary history of violent male-male com¬
petition." Other signs include the effects of testosterone on dominance and
violence (which we will encounter in the chapter on gender), the emotion of
anger (complete with reflexive baring of the canine teeth and clenching of the
fists), the revealingly named fight-or-flight response of the autonomic ner¬
vous system, and the fact that disruptions of inhibitory systems of the brain
(by alcohol, damage to the frontal lobe or amygdala, or defective genes in¬
volved in serotonin metabolism) can lead to aggressive attacks, initiated by
circuits in the limbic system.?

Boys in all cultures spontaneously engage in rough-and-tumble play,
which is obviously practice for fighting. They also divide themselves into co¬
alitions that compete aggressively (calling to mind the remark attributed to
the Duke ofWellington that "the Battle ofWaterloo was won upon the playing
fields of Eton").43 And children are violent well before they have been infected
by war toys or cultural stereotypes. The most violent age is not adolescence but
toddlerhood: in a recent large study, almost half the boys just past the age of
two, and a slightly smaller percentage of the girls, engaged in hitting, biting,
and kicking. As the author pointed out, "Babies do not kill each other, because
we do not give them access to knives and guns. The question ... we've been
trying to answer for the past 30 years is how do children learn to aggress. [But]
that's the wrong question. The right question is how do they learn not to
aggress.?"

Violence continues to preoccupy the mind throughout life. According to
independent surveys in several countries by the psychologists Douglas Ken-
rick and David Buss, more than 80 percent of women and 90 percent of men

3 16/Hot Buttons

fantasize about killing people they don’t like, especially romantic rivals, step¬
parents, and people who have humiliated them in public." People in all cul¬
tures take pleasure in thinking about killings, if we are to judge by the
popularity of murder mysteries, crime dramas, spy thrillers, Shakespearean
tragedies, biblical stories, hero myths, and epic poems. (A character in Tom
Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstem Are Dead asks, "You're familiar with
the great tragedies of antiquity, are you? The great homicidal classics?") Peo¬
ple also enjoy watching the stylized combat we call "sports;' which are contests
of aiming, chasing, or fighting, complete with victors and the vanquished. If
language is a guide, many other efforts are conceptualized as forms of aggres¬
sion: intellectual argument (to shootdown, defeat, or destroy an idea or its pro¬
ponent), social reform (tofight crime, to combatprejndice, the War on Poverty,
the War on Drugs), and medical treatment (tofight cancer, painkillers, to defeat
AIDS, the War on Cancer).

In fact, the entire question of what went wrong (socially or biologically)
when a person engages in violence is badly posed. Almost everyone recognizes
the need for violence in defense of self, family, and innocent victims. Moral
philosophers point out that there are even circumstances in which torture is
justified-say, when a captured terrorist has planted a time bomb in a
crowded place and refuses to say where it is. More generally, whether a violent
mindset is called heroic or pathological often depends on whose ox has been
gored. Freedom fighter or terrorist, Robin Hood or thief. Guardian Angel or
vigilante, nobleman or warlord, martyr or kamikaze, general or gang leader-
these are value judgments, not scientific classifications. I doubt that the brains
or genes of most of the lauded protagonists would differ from those of their
vilified counterparts.

In this way I find myself in agreement with the radical scientists who insist
that we will never understand violence by looking only at the genes or brains
of violent people. Violence is a social and political problem, not just a biolog¬
ical and psychological one. Nonetheless, the phenomena we call "social» and
"political are not external happenings that mysteriously affect human affairs
like sunspots; they are shared understandings among individuals at a given
time and place. So one cannot understand violence without a thorough un¬
derstanding of the human mind.

In the rest of this chapter I explore the logic of violence, and why emotions
and thoughts devoted to it may have evolved. This is necessary to disentangle
the knot of biological and c ultural causes that make violence so puzzling. 11 can
help explain why people are prepared for violence but act on those inclinations
only in particular circumstances; when violence is, at least in some sense, ra¬
tional and when it is blatantly self-defeating; why violence is more prevalent in
some times and places than in others, despite a lack of any genetic difference
among the actors; and, ultimately, how we might reduce and prevent violence.

Violence / 317

the first step in understanding violence is to set aside our abhorrence of it
long enough to examine why it can sometimes payoff in personal or evolu¬
tionary terms. This requires one to invert the statement of the problem-not
why violence occurs, but why it is avoided. Morality, after all, did not enter the
universe with the Big Bang and then pervade it like background radiation. It
was discovered by our ancestors after billions of years of the morally indiffer¬
ent process known as natural selection.

In my view, the consequences of this background amorality were best
worked out by Hobbes in Leviathan. Unfortunately, Hobbes's pithy phrase
"nasty, brutish, and short" and his image of an all-powerful leviathan keeping
us from each other's throats have led people to misunderstand his argument.
Hobbes is commonly interpreted as proposing that man in a state of nature
was saddled with an irrational impulse for hatred and destruction. In fact his
analysis is more subtle, and perhaps even more tragic, for he showed how the
dynamics of violence fallout of interactions among rational and self-
interested agents. Hobbes's analysis has been rediscovered by evolutionary bi¬
ology, game theory, and social psychology, and I will use it to organize my
discussion of the logic of violence before turning to the ways in which humans
deploy peaceable instincts to counteract their violent ones.

Here is the analysis that preceded the famous "life of man" passage:

So that in the nature of man, we find three principal causes of quarrel.
First, competition; secondly, diffidence; thirdly, glory. The first maketh
men invade for gain; the second, for safety; and the third, for reputation.

The first use violence, to make themselves masters of other men’s per¬
sons, wives, children, and cattle; the second, to defend them; the third,
for trifles, as a word, a smile, a different opinion, and any other sign of
undervalue, either direct in their persons or by reflection in their kin¬
dred, their friends, their nation, their profession, or their name."

First, competition. Natural selection is powered by competition, which
means that the products of natural selection-survival machines, in Richard
Dawkins's metaphor-should, by default, do whatever helps them survive and
reproduce. He explains;

To a survival machine, another survival machine (which is not its own
child or another close relative) is part of its environment, like a rock or
a river or a lump of food. It is something that gets in the way, or some¬
thing that can be exploited. It differs from a rock or a river in one im¬
portant respect: it is inclined to hit back. This is because it too is a
machine that holds its immortal genes in trust for the future, and it too

318/Hot Buttons

will stop at nothing to preserve them. Natural selection favors genes that
control their survival machines in such a way that they make the best use
of their environment. This includes making the best use of other sur¬
vival machines, both of the same and of different species."

If an obstacle stands in the way of something an organism needs, it should
neutralize the obstacle by disabling or eliminating it. This includes obstacles
that happen to be other human beings-say, ones that are monopolizing de¬
sirable land or sources of food. Even among modern nation-states, raw self-
interest is a major motive for war. The political scientist Bruce Bueno de
Mesquita analyzed the instigators of 251 real-world conflicts of the past two
centuries and concluded that in most cases the aggressor correctly calculated
that a successful invasion would be in its national interest."

Another human obstacle consists of men who are monopolizing women
who could otherwise be taken as wives. Hobbes called attention to the phe¬
nomenon without knowing the evolutionary reason, which was provided
centuries later by Robert Trivers: the difference in the minimal parental in¬
vestments of males and females makes the reproductive capacity of females a
scarce commodity over which males compete." This explains why men are the
violent gender, and also why they always have something to fight over, even
when their survival needs have been met. Studies of warfare in pre-state soci¬
eties have confirmed that men do not have to be short of food or land to wage
war .50 They often raid other villages to abduct women, to retaliate for past ab¬
ductions, or to defend their interests in disputes over exchanges of women for
marriage; In societies in which women have more say in the matter, men still
compete for women by competing for the status and wealth that tend to attract
them. The competition can be violent because, as Daly and Wilson point out,
“Any creature that is recognizably on track toward complete reproductive fail¬
ure must somehow expend effort, often at risk of death, to try to improve its
present life trajectory;"?' Impoverished young men on this track are therefore
likely to risk life and limb to improve their chances in the sweepstakes for sta¬
tus, wealth, and mates. 52 In all societies they are the demographic sector in
which the firebrands, delinquents, and cannon fodder are concentrated. One
of the reasons the crime rate shot up in the 1960s is that boys from the baby
boom began to enter their crime-prone years.P Though there are many rea¬
sons why countries differ in their willingness to wage war, one factor is simply
the proportion of the population that consists of men between the ages of fif¬
teen and twenty-nine. 54

This whole cynical analysis may not ring true to modern readers, because
we cannot think of other people as mere parts of our environment that may
have to be neutralized like weeds in a garden. Unless we are psychopaths, we
sympathize with other people and cannot blithely treat them as obstacles or

Violence / 319

prey. Such sympathy, however, has not prevented people from committing all
manner of atrocities throughout history and prehistory. The contradiction
may be resolved by recalling that people discern a moral circle that may not
embrace all human beings but only the members of their clan, village, or
tribe." Inside the circle, fellow humans are targets of sympathy; outside, they
are treated like a rock or a river or a lump of food. In a previous book I men¬
tioned that the language of the Wari people of the Amazon has a set of noun
classifiers that distinguish edible from inedible objects, and that the edible
class includes anyone who is not a member of the tribe. This prompted the
psychologist Judith Rich Harris to observe:

In the Wari dictionary
Food's defined as «Not a Wari."

Their dinners are a lot of fun
For all but the un-Wari one.

Cannibalism is so repugnant to us that for years even anthropologists
failed to admit that it was common in prehistory. It is easy to think: could
other human beings really be capable of such a depraved act? But of course an¬
imal rights activists have a similarly low opinion of meat eaters, who not only
cause millions of preventable deaths but do so with utter callousness: castrat¬
ing and branding cattle without an anesthetic, impaling fish by the mouth and
letting them suffocate in the hold of a boat, boiling lobsters alive. My point is
not to make a moral case for vegetarianism but to shed light on the mindset of
human violence and cruelty. History and ethnography suggest that people can
treat strangers the way we now treat lobsters, and our incomprehension of
such deeds may be compared with animal rights activists' incomprehension of
ours. It is no coincidence that Peter Singer, the author of The Expanding Circle,
is also the author of Animal Liberation.

The observation that people may be morally indifferent to other people
who are outside a mental circle immediately suggests an opening for the effort
to reduce violence: understand the psychology of the circle well enough to en¬
courage people to put all of humanity inside it. In earlier chapters we saw how
the moral circle has been growing for millennia, pushed outward by the ex¬
panding networks of reciprocity that make other human beings more valuable
alive than dead. 56 As Robert Wright has put it, «Amongthe manyreasons Idon't
think we should bomb the Japanese is that they built my minivan." Other tech¬
nologies have contributed to a cosmopolitan view that makes it easy to imag¬
ine trading places with other people. These include literacy, travel, a knowledge
of history, and realistic art that helps people project themselves into the daily
lives of people who in other times might have been their mortal enemies.

We have also seen how the circle can shrink. Recall that Jonathan Glover

320 /Hot Buttons

showed that atrocities are often accompanied by tactics of dehumanization
such as the use of pejorative names, degrading conditions, humiliating dress,
and "cold jokes" that make light of suffering. 57 These tactics can flip a mental
switch and reclassify an individual from "person" to "nonperson;' making it as
easy for someone to torture or kill him as it is for us to boil a lobster alive.
(Those who poke fun at politically correct names for ethnic minorities, in¬
cluding me, should keep in mind that they originally had a humane rationale.)
The social psychologist Philip Zimbardo has shown that even among the stu¬
dents of an elite university, tactics of dehumanization can easily push one per¬
son outside another's moral circle. Zimbardo created a mock prison in the
basement of the Stanford University psychology department and randomly
assigned students to the role ofprisoner or guard. The "prisoners" had to wear
smocks, leg irons, and nylon-stocking caps and were referred to by serial num¬
bers. Before long the "guards" began to brutalize them-standing on their
backs while they did push-ups, spraying them with fire extinguishers, forcing
them to clean toilets with their bare hands-and Zimbardo called off the ex¬
periment for the subjects' safety.58

In the other direction, signs of a victim's humanity can occasionally break
through and flip the switch back to the sympathy setting. When George Orwell
fought in the Spanish Civil War, he once saw a man running for his life half-
dressed, holding up his pants with one hand. “I refrained from shooting at
him," Orwell wrote. "I did not shoot partly because of that detail about the
trousers. I had come here to shoot at 'Fascists'; but a man who is holding up his
trousers isn't a 'Fascist; he is visibly a fellow creature, similar to your self."59
Glover recounts another example, reported by a South African journalist:

In 1985, in the old apartheid South Africa, there was a demonstration in
Durban. The police attacked the demonstrators with customary vio¬
lence. One policeman chased a black woman, obviously intending to
beat her with his club. As she ran, her shoe slipped off. The brutal po¬
liceman was also a well-brought-up young Afrikaner, who knew that
when a woman loses her shoe you pick it up for her. Their eyes met as he
handed her the shoe. He then left her, since clubbing her was no longer
an option/"

We should not, however, delude ourselves into thinking that the reaction
of Orwell (one of the twentieth century's greatest moral voices)- and of the
"well-brought-up" Afrikaner is typical. Many intellectuals believe that the ma¬
jority of soldiers cannot bring themselves to fire their weapons in battle. The
claim is incredible on the face of it, given the tens of millions of soldiers who
were shot in the wars of the last century. (I am reminded of the professor in
Stoppard's Jumpers who noted that Zeno's Paradox prevents an arrow from

Violence / 321

ever reaching its target, so Saint Sebastian must have died of fright.) The belief
turns out to be traceable to a single, dubious study of infantrymen in World
War II. In follow-up interviews, the men denied having even been asked
whether they had fired their weapons, let alone having claimed they hadn't/"
Recent surveys of soldiers in battle and of rioters in ethnic massacres find that
they often kill with gusto, sometimes in a state they describe as "joy" or "ec-
stasy."62

Glover’s anecdotes reinforce the hope that people are capable of putting
strangers inside a violence-proof moral circle. But they also remind us that the
default setting may be to keep them out.

SECONDLY, DIFFIDENCE, IN its original sense of "distrust." Hobbes had trans¬
lated Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War and was struck by his ob¬
servation that "what made war inevitable was the growth of Athenian power
and the fear which this caused in Sparta:' If you have neighbors, they may
covet what you have, in which case you have become an obstacle to their de¬
sires. Therefore you must be prepared to defend yourself. Defense is an iffy
matter even with technologies such as castle walls, the Maginot Line, or an-
tiballistic missile defenses, and it is even iffier without them. The only option
for self-protection may be to wipe out potentially hostile neighbors first in a
preemptive strike. As Yogi Berra advised, "The best defense is a good offense
and vice versa."

Tragically, you might arrive at this conclusion even if you didn't have an
aggressive bone in your body. All it would take is the realization that others
might covet what you have and a strong desire not to be massacred. Even more
tragically, your neighbors have every reason to be cranking through the same
deduction, and if they are, it makes your fears all the more compelling, which
makes a preemptive strike all the more tempting, which makes a preemptive
strike by them all the more tempting, and so on.

This "Hobbesian trap;' as it is now called, is a ubiquitous cause of violent
conflict." The political scientist Thomas Schelling offered the analogy of an
armed homeowner who surprises an armed burglar. Each might be tempted to
shoot first to avoid being shot, even if neither wanted to kill the other. A
Hobbesian trap pitting one man against another is a recurring theme in fic¬
tion, such as the desperado in Hollywood westerns, spy-versus-spy plots in
cold-war thrillers, and the lyrics to Bob Marley's "I Shot the Sheriff."

But because we are a social species, Hobbesian traps more commonly pit
groups against groups. There is safety in numbers, so humans, bound by
shared genes or reciprocal promises, form coalitions for protection. Unfortu¬
nately, the logic of the Hobbesian trap means there is also danger in numbers,
because neighbors may fear they are becoming outnumbered and form al¬
liances in their turn to contain the growing menace. Since one man's contain-

322/Hot Buttons

ment is another man's encirclement, this can send the spiral of danger upward.
Human sociality is the original "entangling alliance:’ in which two parties with
no prior animus can find themselves at war when the ally of one attacks the
ally of the other. It is the reason I discuss homicide and war in a single chapter.
In a species whose members form bonds ofloyalty, the first can easily turn into
the second.

The danger is particularly acute for humans because, unlike most mam¬
mals, we tend to be patrilocal, with related males living together instead of dis¬
persing from the group when they become sexually mature." (Among
chimpanzees and dolphins, related males also live together, and they too form
aggressive coalitions.) What we call "ethnic groups" are very large extended
families, and though in a modern ethnic group the family ties are too distant
for kin-based altruism to be significant, this was not true of the smaller coali¬
tions in which we evolved. Even today ethnic groups often perceive themselves
as large families, and the role of ethnic loyalties in group-against-group vio¬
lence is all too obvious/"

The other distinctive feature of Homo sapiens as a species is, of course,
toolmaking. Competitiveness can channel toolmaking into weaponry, and dif¬
fidence can channel weaponry into an arms race. An arms race, like an al¬
liance, can make war more likely by accelerating the spiral of fear and distrust.
Our species’ vaunted ability to make tools is one of the reasons we are so good
at killing one another.

The vicious circle of a Hobbesian trap can help us understand why the es¬
calation from friction to war (and occasionally, the de-escalation to detente)
can happen so suddenly. Mathematicians and computer simulators have de¬
vised models in which several players acquire arms or form alliances in re¬
sponse to what the other players are doing. The models often display chaotic
behavior, in which small differences in the values of the parameters can have
large and unpredictable consequences/"

As we can infer from Hobbes’s allusion to the Peloponnesian War,
Hobbesian traps among groups are far from hypothetical. Chagnon describes
how Yanomamo villages obsess over the danger of being massacred by other
villages (with good reason) and occasionally engage in preemptive assaults,
giving other villages good reason to engage in their own preemptive assaults,
and prompting groups of villages to form alliances that make their neighbors
ever more nervous." Streetgangs and Mafia families engage in similar machi¬
nations. In the past century. World War I, the Six-Day Arab-Israeli War, and
the Yugoslavian wars in the 1990s arose in part from Hobbesian traps."

The political scientist John Vasquez.has made the point quantitatively.
Using a database of hundreds of conflicts from the past two centuries, he con¬
cludes that the ingredients of a Hobbesian trap-concern with security, en¬
tangling alliances, and arms races-can statistically predict the escalation of

Violence / 323

friction into war. 69 The most conscious playing-out of the logic of Hobbesian
traps took place among nuclear strategists during the cold war, when the fate
of the world literally hinged on it. The logic produced some of the maddening
paradoxes of nuclear strategy: why it is extraordinarily dangerous to have
enough missiles to destroy an enemy but not enough to destroy him after he
has attacked those missiles (because the enemy would have a strong incentive
to strike preemptively) and why erecting an impregnable defense against
enemy missiles could make the world a more dangerous place (because the
enemy has an incentive to launch a preemptive strike before the completed de¬
fense turns him into a sitting duck).

When a stronger group overpowers a weaker one in a .surprise raid, it
should come as no surprise to a Hobbesian cynic. But when one side defeats
another in a battle that both have joined, the logic is not so clear. Given that
both the victor and the vanquished have much to lose in a battle, one would
expect each side to assess the strength of the other and the weaker to cede the
contested resource without useless bloodshed that would only lead to the same
outcome. Most behavioral ecologists believe that rituals of appeasement and
surrender among animals evolved for this reason (and not for the good of the
species, as Lorenz had supposed). Sometimes the two sides are so well
matched, and the stakes of a battle are so high, that they engage in a battle be¬
cause it is the only way to find out who is stronger. 70

But at other times a leader will march-or march his men-into the val¬
ley of death without any reasonable hope of prevailing. Military incompetence
has long puzzled historians, and the primatologist Richard Wrangham sug¬
gests that it might grow out of the logic of bluff and self-deception." Con¬
vincing an adversary to avoid a battle does not depend on ftemgstronger but
on appearing stronger, and that creates an incentive to bluff and to be good at
detecting bluffs. Since the most effective bluffer is the one who believes his
own bluff, a limited degree of self-deception in hostile escalations can evolve.
It has to be limited, because having one's bluff called can be worse than fold¬
ing on the first round, but when the limits are miscalibrated and both sides go
to the brink, the result can be a human disaster. The historian Barbara Tuch-
man has highlighted the role of self-deception in calamitous wars throughout
history in her books The Guns of August (about World War I) and The March
of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam.

A readiness to inflict a preemptive strike is a double-edged sword, because
it makes one an inviting target for a preemptive strike. So people have in¬
vented, and perhaps evolved, an alternative defense: the advertised deterrence
policy known as lextalionis, the law of retaliation, familiar from-the biblical in¬
junction "An eye for an eye, a tooth for atooth,"? If you can credibly sayto po¬
tential adversaries, "We won't attack first) but if we are attacked, we will survive

324/Hot Buttons

and strike back:' you remove Hobbes's first two incentives for quarrel, gain
and mistrust. The policy that you will infliet as much harm on others as they
inflicted on you cancels their incentive to raid for gain, and the policy that you
will not strike first cancels their incentive to raid for mistrust. This is rein¬
forced by the policy to retaliate with no more harm than they inflicted on you,
because it allays the fear thatyou will use a flimsy pretext to justify a massive
opportunistic raid.

The nuclear strategy of "Mutual Assured Destruction" is the most obvious
contemporary example of the law of retaliation. But it is an explicit version of
an ancient impulse, the emotion of vengeance, that may have been installed in
our brains by natural selection. Daly and Wilson' observe, «In societies from
every corner of the world, we can read of vows to avenge a slain father or
brother, and of rituals that sanctify those vows-ofa mother raising her son to
avenge a father who died in the avenger's infancy, of graveside vows, of drink¬
ing the deceased kinsman's blood as a covenant, or keeping his bloody gar¬
ment as a relic."? Modern states often find themselves at odds with their
citizens' craving for revenge. They prosecute vigilantes-people who «take the
law into their own hands"-and, with a few recent exceptions, ignore the
clamoring of crime victims and their relatives for a say in decisions to prose¬
cute, plea-bargain, or punish.

As we saw in Chapter 10, for revenge to work as a deterrent it has to be im¬
placable. Exacting revenge is a risky business, because if an adversary was dan¬
gerous enough to have hurt you in the first place, he is not likely to take
punishment lying down. Since the damage has already been done, a coolly ra¬
tional victim may not see it in his interes ts to retaliate. And since the aggressor
can anticipate this, he could call the victim's bluff and abuse him with im¬
punity. If, on the other hand, potential victims and their kin would be so con¬
sumed with the lust for retribution as to raise a son to avenge a slain father,
drink the kinsman's blood as a covenant, and so on, an aggressor might think
twice before aggressing.r'

The law of retaliation requires that the vengeance have a moralistic pretext
to distinguish it from a raw assault. The avenger must have been provoked by
a prior act of aggression or other injustice. Studies of feuds, wars, and ethnic
violence show that the perpetrators are almost always inflamed by some griev¬
ance against their targets." The danger inherent in this psychology is obvious:
two sides may disagree over whether an initial act of violence was justified
(perhaps as an act of self-defense, the recovery of ill-gotten gains, or retribu¬
tion for an earlier offense) or was an act of unprovoked aggression. One side
may count an even number of reprisals and feel that the scales of justice have
been balanced, while the other side counts an odd number and feels that they
still have a score to settle.” Self-deception may embolden each side's belief in
the rectitude of its cause and make reconciliation almost impossible.

Violence / 325

Also necessary for vengeance to work as a deterrent is that the willingness
to pursue it be made public, because the whole point of deterrence is to give
would-be attackers second thoughts beforehand. And this brings us to
Hobbes's final reason for quarrel.

THIRDLY, GLORY-THOUGH a more accurate word would be "honor."
Hobbes's observation that men fight over “a word, a smile, a different opinion,
and any other sign of undervalue" is as true now as it was in the seventeenth
century. For as long as urban crime statistics have been recorded, the most fre¬
quent cause ofhomicide has been "argument"-what police blotters classify as
"altercation of relatively trivial origin; insult, curse, jostling) etc,"? A Dallas
homicide detective recalls, "Murders result from little 01' arguments over
nothing at all. Tempers flare. A fight starts, and somebody gets stabbed or shot.
I've worked on cases where the principals had been arguing over a 10 cent
record on a juke box, or over a one dollar gambling debt from a dice game.?"

Wars between nation-states are often fought over national honor, even
when the material stakes are small. In the late 1960s and early 1970s , most
Americans had become disenchanted over their country's involvement in the
war in Vietnam, which they thought was immoral or unwinnable or both. But
rather than agreeing to withdraw American forces unconditionally, as the
peace movement had advocated, a majority supported Richard Nixon and his
slogan "Peace with Honor." In practice this turned into a slow withdrawal of
American troops that prolonged the military presence until 1973 at a cost of
twenty thousand American lives and the lives of many more Vie tnamese-and
with the same outcome) defeat of the South Vietnamese government. A de¬
fense of national honor was behind other recent wars, such as the British re¬
taking of the Falkland Islands in 1982 and the American invasion of Grenada
in 1983. A ruinous 1969 war between El Salvador and Honduras began with a
disputed game between their national soccer teams.

Because of the logic of deterrence, fights over personal or national honor
are not as idiotic as they seem. In a hostile milieu, people and countries must
advertise their willingness to retaliate against anyone who would profit at their
expense, and that means maintaining a reputation for avenging any slight or
trespass, no matter how small. They must make it known that, in the words of
the Jim Croce song, "You don't tug on Superman's cape; you don't spit into the
wind; you don't pull the mask off the old Lone Ranger; and you don’t mess
around with Jim."

The mentality is foreign to those of us who can get Leviathan to show up
by dialing 911, but that option is not always available. It was not available to
people in pre-state societies, or on the frontier in the Appalachians or the Wild
West, or in the remote highlands of Scotland, the Balkans, or Indochina. It is
not available to people who are unwilling to bring in the police because of the

326/Hot Buttons

nature of their work, such as Prohibition rum-runners, inner-city drug deal¬
ers, and Mafia wise guys. And it is not available to nation-states in their deal¬
ings with one another. Daly and Wilson comment on the mentality that
applies in all these arenas:

In chronically feuding and warring societies, an essential manly virtue is
the capacity for violence; head-hunting and coup counting may then
become prestigious, and the commission of a homicide may even be an
obligatory rite of passage. To turn the other cheek is not saintly but stu¬
pid. Or contemptibly weak."

So the social constructionists I cited earlier are not wrong in pointing to a
culture of combative masculinity as a major cause of violence. But they are
wrong in thinking that it is peculiarly American, that it is caused by separation
from one's mother or an unwillingness to express one's emotions, and that it is
an arbitrary social construction that can be "deconstructed" by verbal com¬
mentary. And fans of the public health approach are correct that rates of vio¬
lence vary with social conditions, but they are wrong in thinking that violence
is a pathology in anything like the medical sense. Cultures of honor spring up
all over the world because they amplify universal human emotions like pride,
anger, revenge, and the love of kith and kin, and because they appear at the
time to be sensible responses to local conditions." Indeed, the emotions them¬
selves are thoroughly familiar even when they don't erupt in violence, such as
in road rage, office politics, political mudslinging, academic backstabbing, and
email flame wars.

In Culture of Honor, the social psychologists Richard Nisbett and Dov
Cohen show that violent cultures arise in societies that are beyond the reach of
the law and in which precious assets are easily stolen." Societies that herd an¬
imals meet both conditions. Herders tend to live in territories that are unsuit¬
able for growing crops and thus far from the centers of government. And their
major asset, livestock, is easier to steal than the major asset offarmers, land. In
herding societies a man can be stripped of his wealth (and of his ability to ac¬
quire wealth) in an eyeblink. Men in thatmilieu cultivate a hair trigger for vi¬
olent retaliation, not just against rustlers, but against anyone who would test
their resolve by signs of disrespect that could reveal them to be easy pickings
for rustlers. Scottish highlanders, Appalachian mountain men. Western cow¬
boys, Masai warriors, Sioux Indians, Druze and Bedouin tribesmen, Balkan
clansmen, and Indochinese Montagnards are familiar examples.

A man's honor is a kind of "social reality" in John Searle's sense: it exists
because everyone agrees it exists, but it is no less real for that, since it resides in
a shared granting of power. When the lifestyle of a people changes, their cul¬
ture of honor can stay with them for a long time, because it is difficult for

Violence / 327

anyone to be the first to renounce the culture. The very act of renouncing it
can be a concession of weakness and low status even when the sheep and
mountains are a distant memory.

The American South has long had higher rates of violence than the
North, including a tradition of dueling among "men of honor" such as An¬
drew Jackson. Nisbett and Cohen note that much of the South was originally
settled by Scottish and Irish herdsman, whereas the North was settled by
English farmers. Also, for much of its history the mountainous frontier of
the South was beyond the reach of the law. The resulting Southern culture
of honor is, remarkably, alive at the turn of the twenty-first century in laws
and social attitudes. Southern states place fewer restrictions on gun owner¬
ship, allow people to shoot an assailant or burglar without having to retreat
first, are tolerant of spanking by parents and corporal punishment by schools,
are more hawkish on issues of national defense, and execute more of their
criminals."

These attitudes do not float in a cloud called«culture" but are visible in the
psychology of individual Southerners. Nisbett and Cohen advertised a fake
psychology experiment at the liberal University of Michigan. To get to the lab,
respondents had to squeeze by a stooge who was filing papers in a hallway. As
a respondent brushed past him, the stooge slammed the drawer shut and mut¬
tered, "Asshole," Students from Northern states laughed him off, but students
from Southern states were visibly upset. The Southerners had elevated levelsof
testosterone and cortisol (a stress hormone) and reported lower levelsof self¬
esteem. They compensated by giving a firmer handshake and acting more
dominant toward the experimenter, and on the way out of the lab they refused
to back down when another stooge approached in a narrow hallway and one
of the two had to step aside. It's not that Southerners walk around chronically
fuming: a control group who had not been insulted were as cool and collected
as the Northerners. And Southerners do not approve of violence in the ab¬
stract, only of violence provoked by an insult or trespass.

African American inner-city neighborhoods are among the more con¬
spicuously violent environments in Western democracies, and they too have
an entrenched culture of honor. In his insightful essay "The Code of the
Streets," the sociologist Elijah Anderson describes the young men's obsession
with respect, their cultivation of a reputation for toughness, their willingness
to engage in violent retaliation for any slight, and their universal acknowledg¬
ment of the rules of this code." Were it not for giveaways in their dialect, such
as "If someone disses you, you got to straighten them out;' Anderson's de¬
scription of the code would be indistinguishable from accounts of the culture
of honor among white Southerners.

Inner-city African Americans were never goatherds, so why did they de¬
velop a culture of honor? One possibility is that they brought it with them from

328 / Hot Buttons

the South when they migrated to large cities after the two world wars-a nice
irony for Southern racists who would blame inner-city violence on something
distinctively African American. Another factor is that the young men's wealth
is easily stealable) since it is often in the form of cash or drugs. A third is that
the ghettos are a kind of frontier in which police protection is unreliable-the
gangsta rap group Public Enemy has a recording called "911 Isa Joke. "A fourth
is that poor people) especially young men) cannot take pride in a prestigious
job) a nice house, or professional accomplishments) and this may be doubly
true for African Americans after centuries of slavery and discrimination. Their
reputation on the streets is their only claim to status. Finally)Anderson points
out that the code of the streets is self-perpetuating. A majority of African
American families in the inner city subscribe to peaceable middle-class values
they refer to as "decent.T" But that is not enough to end the culture of honor:

Everybody knows that if the rules are violated) there are penalties.
Knowledge of the code is thus largely defensive; it is literally necessary
for operating in public. Therefore) even though families with a decency
orientation are usually opposed to the values of the code) they often re¬
luctantly encourage their children's familiarity with it to enable them to
negotiate the inner-city environment. 85

Studies of the dynamics of ghetto violence are consistent with Anderson's
analysis. The jump in American urban crime rates between 1985 and 1993 can
be tied in part to the appearance of crack cocaine and the underground econ¬
omy it spawned. As the economist Jeff Grogger points out, "Violence is a way
to enforce property rights in the absence oflegal recourse."86 The emergence of
violence within the new drug economy then set off the expected Hobbesian
trap. As the criminologist Jeffrey Fagan noted) gun use spread contagiously as
"young people who otherwise wouldn't carry guns felt that they had to in
order to avoid being victimized by their armed peers."? And as we saw in the
chapter on politics, conspicuous economic inequality is a good predictor of
violence (better than poverty itself), presumably because men deprived of le¬
gitimate means of acquiring status compete for status on the streets instead."
It is not surprising) then) that when African American teenagers are taken out
of underclass neighborhoods they are no more violent or delinquent than
white teenagers."

hobbess analysis of the causes of violence, borne out by modern data on
crime and war) shows that violence is not a primitive, irrational urge, nor is it
a "pathology" except in the metaphorical sense of a condition that everyone
would like to eliminate. Instead) it is a near-inevitable outcome ofthe dynam¬
ics of self-interested) rational social organisms.

Violence / 329

But Hobbes is famous for presenting not just the causes of violence but a
means of preventing it: “a common power to keep them all in awe.” His com¬
monwealth was a means of implementing the principle “that a man be willing,
when others are so too ... to lay down this right to all things; and be contented
with so much liberty against other men, as he would allow other men against
himself."?" People vest authority in a sovereign person or assembly who can
use the collective force of the contractors to hold each one to the agreement,
because "covenants, without the sword, are but words, and of no strength to
secure a man at all,"?'

A governing body that has been granted a m-onopoly on the legitimate use
of violence can neutralize each of Hobbes's reasons for quarrel. By inflicting
penalties on aggressors, the governing body eliminates the profitability of in¬
vading for gain. That in turn defuses the Hobbesian trap in which mutually dis¬
trustful peoples are each tempted to inflict a preemptive strike to avoid being
invaded for gain. And a system of laws that defines infractions and penalties
and metes them out disinterestedly can obviate the need for a hair trigger for
retaliation and the accompanying culture of honor. People can rest assured that
someone else will impose disincentives on their enemies, making it unneces¬
sary for them to maintain a belligerent stance to prove they are not punching
bags. And having a third party measure the infractions and the punishments
circumvents the hazard of self-deception, which ordinarily convinces those on
each side that they have suffered the greater number of offenses. These advan¬
tages of third-party intercession can also come from nongovernmental meth¬
ods of conflict resolution, in which mediators try to help the hostile parties
negotiate an agreement or arbitrators render a verdict but cannot enforce it. 92
The problem with these toothless measures is that the parties can always walk
away when the outcome doesn't come out the way they want.

Adjudication by an armed authority appears to be the most effective gen¬
eral violence-reduction technique ever invented. Though we debate whether
tweaks in criminal policy, such as executing murderers versus locking them up
for life, can reduce violence by a few percentage points, there can be no debate
on the massive effects of having a criminal justice system as opposed to living
in anarchy. The shockingly high homicide rates of pre-state societies, with 10
to 60 percent of the men dying at the hands of other men, provide one kind of
evidence." Another is the emergence of a violent culture of honor in just
about any corner of the world that is beyond the reach of the law.?' Many his¬
torians argue that people acquiesced to centralized authorities during the
Middle Ages and other periods to relieve themselves of the burden of having
to retaliate against those who would harm them and their kin." And the
growth of those authorities may explain the hundredfold decline in homicide
rates in European societies since the Middle Ages." The United States saw a
dramatic reduction in urban crime rates from the first half of the nineteenth

330! Hot Buttons

century to the second half, which coincided with the formation of professional
police forces in the cities." The causes of the decline in American crime in the
1990s are controversial and probably multifarious, but many criminologists
trace it in part to more intensive community policing and higher incarceration
rates of violent criminals."

The inverse is true as well. When law enforcement vanishes, all manner of
violence breaks out: looting, settling old scores, ethnic cleansing, and petty
warfare among gangs, warlords, and mafias. This was obvious in the remnants
of Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union, and parts of Africa in the 1990s,but can also
happen in countries with a long tradition of civility. As a young teenager in
proudly peaceable Canada during the romantic 1960s, I was a true believer in
Bakunin's anarchism. I laughed off my parents' argument that if the govern¬
ment ever laid down its arms all hell would break loose. Our competing pre¬
dictions were put to the test at 8:00 a m. on October 17, 1969, when the
Montreal police went on strike. By 11:20 a m. the first bank was robbed. By
noon most downtown stores had closed because oflooting. Within a few more
hours, taxi drivers burned down the garage of a limousine service that had
competed with them for airport customers, a rooftop sniper killed a provincial
police officer, rioters broke into several hotels and restaurants, and a doctor
slew a burglar in his suburban home. By the end of the day, six banks had been
robbed, a hundred shops had been looted, twelve fires had been set, forty car¬
loads of storefront glass had been broken, and three million dollars in prop¬
erty damage had been inflicted, before city authorities had to call in the army
and, of course, the Mounties to restore order,"? This decisive empirical test left
my politics in tatters (and offered a foretaste of life as a scientist).

The generalization that anarchy in the sense of alack of government leads
to anarchy in the sense of violent chaos may seem banal, but it is often over¬
looked in today's still-romantic climate. Government in general is anathema
to many conservatives, and the police and prison system are anathema to
many liberals. Many people on the left, citing uncertainty about the deterrent
value of capital punishment compared to life imprisonment, maintain that
deterrence is not effective in general. And many oppose more effective polic¬
ing of inner-city neighborhoods, even though it may be the most effective way
for their decent inhabitants to abjure the code of the streets. Certainly we must
combat the racial inequities that put too many African American men in
prison, but as the legal scholar Randall Kennedy has argued, we must also
combat the racial inequities that leave too many African Americans exposed to
criminals.1'" Many on the right oppose-decriminalizing drugs, prostitution,
and gambling without factoring in the costs of the zones of anarchy that, by
their own free-market logic, are inevitably spawned by prohibition policies.
When demand for a commodity is high, suppliers will materialize, and if they
cannot protect their property rights by calling the police, they will do so with

Violence / 331

a violent culture of honor. (This is distinct from the moral argument that our
current drug policies incarcerate multitudes of nonviolent people.) School-
children are currently fed the disinformation that Native Americans and other
peoples in pre-state societies were inherently peaceable, leaving them uncom¬
prehending, indeed contemptuous, of one of our species' greatest inventions,
democratic government and the rule of law.

Where Hobbes fell short was in dealing with the problem of policing the
police. In his view, civil war was such a calamity that any government-
monarchy, aristocracy, or democracy-was preferable to it. He did not seem to
appreciate that in practice a leviathan would not be an otherworldly sea mon¬
ster but a human being or group of them, complete with the deadly sins of
greed, mistrust, and honor. (As we saw in the preceding chapter, this became
the obsession of the heirs of Hobbes who framed the American Constitution.)
Armed men are always a menace, so police who are not under tight democratic
control can be a far worse calamity than the crime and feuding that go on
without them. In the twentieth century, according to the political scientist R. J.
Rummel in Death by Government, 170 million people were killed by their own
governments. Nor is murder-by-government a relic of the tyrannies of the
middle of the century. The World Conflict List for the year 2000 reported:

The stupidest conflict in this year's count is Cameroon. Early in the year,
Cameroon was experiencing widespread problems with violent crime.

The government responded to this crisis by creating and arming militias
and paramilitary groups to stamp out the crime extrajudicially. Now,
while violent crime has fallen, the militias and paramilitaries have cre¬
ated far more chaos and death than crime ever would have. Indeed, as
the year wore on mass graves were discovered that were tied to the para¬
military groups.'?'

The pattern is familiar from other regions of the world (including our own)
and shows that civil libertarians' concern about abusive police practices is an
indispensable counterweight to the monopoly on violence we grant the state.

democratic leviathans have proven to be an effective antiviolence
measure, but they leave much to be desired. Because they fight violence with
violence or the threat of violence, they can be a danger themselves. And it
would be far better if we could find a way to get people to abjure violence to
begin with rather than punishing them after the fact. Worst of all, no one has
.yet figured out how to set up a worldwide democratic leviathan that would pe¬
nalize the aggressive competition, defuse the Hobbesian traps, and eliminate
the cultures of honor that hold between the most dangerous perpetrators of
violence of all, nation-states. As Kant noted, "The depravity of human nature

332 / Hot Buttons

is displayed without disguise in the unrestricted relations which obtain be¬
tween the various nations." 102 The great question is how to get people and na¬
tions to repudiate violence from the start, preempting escalations of hostility
before they can take off.

In the 1960s it all seemed so simple. War is unhealthy for children and
other living things. What if they gave a war and nobody came? War: What is it
good for? Absolutely nothing! The problem with these sentiments is that the
other side has to feel the same way at the same time. In 1939 Neville Cham¬
berlain offered his own antiwar slogan, "Peace in our time." It was followed by
a world war and a holocaust, because his adversary did not agree that war is
good for absolutely nothing. Chamberlain's successor, Churchill, explained
why peace is not a simple matter of unilateral pacifism: "Nothing is worse than
war? Dishonor is worse than war. Slavery is worse than war." A popular
bumper sticker captures a related sentiment: if you want peace, work for
justice. The problem is that what one side sees as honor and justice the other
side may see as dishonor and injustice. Also, "honor” can be a laudable will¬
ingness to defend life and liberty, but it can also be a reckless refusal to de-
escalate.

Sometimes all sides really do see that they would be better off beating their
swords into plowshares. Scholars such as John Keegan and Donald Horowitz
have noted a general decline in the taste for violence as a means of settling dis¬
putes within most Western democracies in the last half-century .1"' Civil wars,
corporal and capital punishment, deadly ethnic riots, and foreign wars requir¬
ing face-to-face killing have declined or vanished. And as I have mentioned,
though some decades in recent centuries have been more violent than others,
the overall trend in crime has been downward.

One possible reason is the cosmopolitan forces that work to expand peo¬
ple's moral circle. Another may be the long-term effects of living with a
leviathan. Today's civility in Europe, after all, followed centuries of beheadings
and public hangings and exiles to penal colonies. And Canada may be more
peaceable than its neighbor in part because its government outraced its people
to the land, Unlike the United States, where settlers fanned out over a vast two-
dimensional landscape with innumerable nooks and crannies, the habitable
portion of Canada is a one-dimensional ribbon along the American border
without remote frontiers and enclaves in which cultures of honor could fester.
According to the Canadian studies scholar Desmond Morton, "Our west ex¬
panded in an orderly, peaceful fashion, with the police arriving before the set¬
tlers."?'

But people can become less truculent without the external incentiv.es of
dollars and cents or governmental brute force. People all over the world have
reflected on the futility of violence (at least when they are evenly enough
matched with their adversaries that no one can prevail). A New Guinean

Violence / 333

native laments, "War is bad and nobody likes it. Sweet potatoes disappear, pigs
disappear, fields deteriorate, and many relatives and friends get killed. But one
cannot help it."105 Chagnon reports that some Yanomamo men reflect on the
futility of their feuds and a few make it known that they will have nothing to
do with raiding.1"' In such cases it can become clear that both sides would
come out ahead by splitting the differences between them rather than contin¬
uing to fight over them. During the trench warfare of World War I, weary
British and German soldiers would probe each other's hostile intent with mo¬
mentary respites in shelling. If the other side responded with a respite in kind,
long periods of unofficial peace broke out beneath the notice of their bellicose
commanders. 107 As a British soldier said, “We don't want to kill you, and you
don't want to kill us, so why shoot?" 108

The most consequential episode in which belligerents sought a way to re¬
lease their deadly embrace was the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, when the
United States discovered Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba and demanded that
they be removed. Khrushchev and Kennedy were both reminded of the human
costs of the nuclear brink they were approaching, Khrushchev by memories of
two world wars fought on his soil, Kennedy by a graphic briefing of the after-
math of an atomic bomb. And each understood they were in aHobbesian trap.
Kennedy had just read The Guns of August and saw how the leaders ofgreat na¬
tions could blunder into a pointless war. Khrushchev wrote to Kennedy:

You and I should not now pull on the ends of the rope in which you have
tied a knot of war, because the harder you and I pull, the tighter this knot
will become. And a time may come when this knot is tied so tight that
the person who tied it is no longer capable of untying it, and then the
knot will have to be cut. 109

By identifying the trap, they could formulate a shared goal of escaping it. In
the teeth of opposition from many of their advisers and large sectors of their
publics, both made concessions that averted a catastrophe.

The problem with violence, then, is that the advantages of deploying it or
renouncing it depend on what the other side does. Such scenarios are the
province of game theory, and game theorists have shown that the best decision
for each player individually is sometimes the worst decision for both collec¬
tively.The most famous example is the Prisoner's Dilemma, in which partners
in crime are held in separate cells. Each is promised freedom ifhe is the first to
implicate his partner (who then will get a harsh sentence), a light sentence if
neither implicates the other, and a moderate sentence if each implicates the
other. The optimal strategy for each prisoner is to defect from their partner¬
ship, but when both do so they end up with a worse outcome than if each
stayed loyal. Yetneither can stay loyal out of fear that his partner might defect

334 / Hot Buttons

and leave him with the worst outcome of all. The Prisoner’s Dilemma is simi¬
lar to the pacifist's dilemma: what is good for one (belligerence) is bad for
both, but what is good for both (pacifism) is unattainable when neither can be
sure the other is opting for it.

The only way to win a Prisoner's Dilemma is to change the rules or find a
way out of the game. The World War I soldiers changed the rules in a way that
has been much discussed in evolutionary psychology: play it repeatedly and
apply a strategy of reciprocity, remembering the other player's last action and
repaying him in kind, no But in many antagonistic encounters that is not an
option, because when the other player defects he can destroy you-or, in the
case of the Cuban Missile Crisis, destroy the world. In that case the players had
to recognize they were in a futile game and mutually decide to get out of it.

Glover draws an important conclusion about how the cognitive compo¬
nent of human nature might allow us to reduce violence even when it appears
to be a rational strategy at the time:

Sometimes, apparently rational self-interested strategies turn out (as in
the prisoners' dilemma ... ) to be self-defeating. This may look like a
defeat for rationality, but it is not. Rationality is saved by its own open-
endedness. If a strategy of following accepted rules of rationality is
sometimes self-defeating, this is not the end. We revise the rules to take
account of this, so producing a higher-order rational strategy. This in
turn may fail, but again we go up a level. At whatever level we fail, there
is always the process of standing back and going up a further level.m

The process of "standing back and going up a further level" might be
necessary to overcome the emotional impediments to peace as well as the
intellectual ones. Diplomatic peacemakers try to hurry along the epiphanies
that prompt adversaries to extricate themselves from a deadly game. They try
to blunt competition by carefully fashioning compromises over the disputed
resources. They try to defuse Hobbesian traps via "confidence-building mea¬
sures" such as making military activities transparent and bringing in third
parties as guarantors. And they try to bring the two sides into each other's
moral circles by facilitating trade, cultural exchanges, and people-to-people
activities.

This is fine as far as it goes, but the diplomats are sometimes frustrated
that at the end of the day the two sides seem to hate each other as much as they
did at the beginning. They continue to demonize their opponents, warp the
facts, and denounce the conciliators on their own side as traitors. Milton J.
Wilkinson, a diplomat who failed to get the Greeks and Turks to bury the
hatchet over Cyprus, suggests that peacemakers must understand the emo¬
tional faculties of adversaries and not just neutralize the current rational

Violence / 335

incentives. The best-laid plans of peacemakers are often derailed by the adver¬
saries' ethnocentrism, sense of honor, moralization, and self-deception.!'?
These mindsets evolved to deal with hostilities in the ancestral past, and we
must bring them into the open if we are to work around them in the present.

An emphasis on the open-endedness of human rationality resonates with
the finding from cognitive science that the mind is a combinatorial, recursive
system.U" Not only do we have thoughts, but we have thoughts about our
thoughts, and thoughts about our thoughts about our thoughts. The advances
in human conflict resolution we have encountered in this chapter-submit¬
ting to the rule of law, figuring out a way for both sides to back down without
losing face, acknowledging the possibility of one's own self-deception, accept¬
ing the equivalence of one's own interests and other people's-depend on this
ability.

Many intellectuals have averted their gaze from the evolutionary logic of
violence, fearing that acknowledging it is tantamount to accepting it or even to
approving it. Instead they have pursued the comforting delusion of the Noble
Savage, in which violence is an arbitrary product of learning or a pathogen
that bores into us from the outside. But denying the logic ofviolence makes it
easy to forget how readily violence can flare up, and ignoring the parts of the
mind that ignite violence makes it easy to overlook the parts that can extin¬
guish it. With violence, as with so many other concerns, human nature is the
problem, but human nature is also the solution.

336/Hot Buttons

Chapter 18

Gender

Now that its namesake year has come and gone, the movie 2001:A Space
Odyssey provides an opportunity to measure imagination against reality.
Arthur C. Clarke's 1968 sci-fi classic traced out the destiny of our species from
ape-men on the savanna to a transcendence of time, space, and bodies that we
can only dimly comprehend. Clarke and the director, Stanley Kubrick, con¬
trived a radical vision of life in the third millennium, and in some ways it has
come to pass. A permanent space station is being built, and voice mail and the
Internet are a routine part of our lives. In other regards Clarke and Kubrick
were overoptimistic about the march of progress. We still don’t have sus¬
pended animation, missions to Jupiter, or computers that read lips and plot
mutinies. And in still other regards they missed the boat completely. In their
vision of the year 2001, people recorded their words on typewriters; Clarke
and Kubrick did not anticipate word processors or laptop computers. And in
their depiction of the new millennium, the American women were "girl assis¬
tants": secretaries, receptionists, and flight attendants.

That these visionaries did not anticipate the revolution in women's status
of the 1970s is a pointed reminder of how quickly social arrangements can
change. It was not so long ago that women were seen as fit only to be
housewives, mothers, and sexual partners, were discouraged from entering the
professions because they would be taking the place of a man, and were rou¬
tinely subjected to discrimination, condescension, and sexual extortion. The
ongoing liberation of women after millennia of oppression is one of the great
moral achievements of our species, and I consider myself fortunate to have
lived through some of its major victories.

The change in the status of women has several causes. One is the inex¬
orable logic of the expanding moral circle, which led also to the abolition of
despotism, slavery, feudalism, and racial segregation. 1 In the midst of the En¬
lightenment, the early feminist Mary Astell (1688-1731) wrote:

Gender / 337

If absolute Sovereignty be not necessary in a State how comes it to be so
in a Family? or if in a Family why not in a State?since no reason can be
alleg'd for the one that will not hold more strongly for the other.

I f all Men are bom free, how is it that all Women are born slaves? As
they must be if the being subjected to the inconstant, uncertain, un¬
known, arbitrary Will of Men, be the perfect Condition of Slaveryi?

Another cause is the technological and economic progress that made it
possible for couples to have sex and raise children without a pitiless division of
labor in which a mother had to devote every waking moment to keeping the
children alive. Clean water, sanitation, and modern medicine lowered infant
mortality and reduced the desire for large broods of children. Baby bottles and
pasteurized cow's milk, and then breast pumps and freezers, made it possible
to feed babies without their mothers being chained to them around the clock.
Mass production made it cheaper to buy things than to make them by hand,
and plumbing, electricity, and appliances reduced the domestic workload even
more. The increased value of brains over brawn in the economy, the extension
of the human lifespan (with the prospect of decades of life after childrearing),
and the affordability of extended education changed the values of women's
options in life. Contraception, amniocentesis, ultrasound, and reproductive
technologies made it possible for women to defer childbearing to the optimal
points in their lives.

And of course the other major cause of women's progress is feminism: the
political, literary, and academic movements that channeled these advances
into tangible changes in policies and attitudes. The first wave of feminism,
bookended in the United States by the Seneca Falls convention of 1848 and the
ratification ofthe Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1920, gave
women the right to vote, to serve asjurors, to hold property in marriage, to di¬
vorce, and to receive an education. The second wave, flowering in the 1970s,
brought women into the professions, changed the division of labor in the
home, exposed sexist biases in business, government, and other institutions,
and threw a spotlight on women's interests in all walks of life. The recent
progress in women's rights has not drained feminism of its raison d'etre. In
much of the Third World, women's position has not improved since the Mid¬
dle Ages, and in our own society women are still subjected to discrimination,
harassment, and violence.

Feminism is widely seen as being opposed to the sciences of human na¬
ture. Many of those scientists believe that the minds of the two sexes differ at
birth, and feminists have pointed out that such beliefs have long been used to
justify the unequal treatment of women. Women were thought to be designed
for childrearing and home life and to be incapable of the reason necessary for

338/Hot Buttons

politics and the professions. Men were believed to harbor irresistible urges that
made them harass and rape women, and that belief served to excuse the per¬
petrators and to license fathers and husbands to control women in the guise of
protecting them. Therefore, it might seem, the theories that are most friendly
to women are the Blank Slate-if nothing is innate, differences between the
sexes cannot be innate-and the Noble Savage-if we harbor no ignoble
urges, sexual exploitation can be eliminated by changing our institutions.

The belief that feminism requires a blank slate and a noble savage has be¬
come a powerful impetus for spreading disinformation. A 1994 headline in the
New York Times science section, for example, proclaimed, "Sexes Equal on
South Sea Isle,’" It was based on the work of the anthropologist Maria Lep-
owsky, who (perhaps channeling the ghost of Margaret Mead) said that gen¬
der relations on the island ofVanatinai prove that “the subjugation of women
by men is not a human universal, and it is not inevitable:'Only late in the story
do we learn what this supposed "equality" amounts to: that men must do bride
service to pay for wives, that warfare had been waged exclusively by men (who
raided neighboring islands for brides), that women spend more time caring
for children and sweeping up pig excrement, and that men spend more time
building their reputations and hunting wild boar (which is accorded more
prestige by both sexes). A similar disconnect between headline and fact ap¬
peared in a 1998 Boston Globe story entitled "Girls Appear to Be Closing Ag¬
gression Gap with Boys."How much have they "closed this gap"? According to
the story, they now commit murder at one-tenth the rate of boys.' And in a
1998 op-ed, the co-producer of Ms. magazine’s "Take Our Daughters to Work
Day" explained recent high school shootings with the remarkable assertion
that boys in America "are being trained by their parents, other adults, and our
culture and media to harass, assault, rape, and murder girls,"?

On the other side, some conservatives are confirming feminists' worst
fears by invoking dubious sex differences to condemn the choices of women.
In a WallStreetJoumal editorial, the political scientist Harvey Mansfield wrote
that “the protective element of manliness is endangered by women having
equal access to jobs outside the home?" A book by F. Carolyn Graglia called
DomesticTranquility: A Brief Against Feminism theorized that women's mater¬
nal and sexual instincts are being distorted by the assertiveness and analytical
mind demanded by a career. The journalists Wendy Shalit and Danielle Crit¬
tenden recently advised women to marry young, postpone their careers, and
care for children in traditional marriages, even though they could not have
written their books if they had followed their own advice." Leon Kasshas taken
it upon himself to inform young women what they want: "For the first time in
human history, mature women by the tens of thousands live the entire decade
of their twenties-their most fertile years-neither in the homes of their

Gender/339

fathers nor in the homes of their husbands; unprotected, lonely, and out of
sync with their inborn nature. Some women positively welcome this state of
affairs, but most do not," 1

There is, in fact, no incompatibility between the principles of feminism
and the possibility that men and women are not psychologically identical. To
repeat: equality is not the empirical claim that all groups of humans are inter¬
changeable; it is the moral principle that individuals should not be judged or
constrained by the average properties of their group. In the case of gender, the
barely defeated Equal Rights Amendment put it succinctly: "Equality of Rights
under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any state
on account of sex." If we recognize this principle, no one has to spin myths
about the indistinguishability of the sexes to justify equality. Nor should any¬
one invoke sex differences to justify discriminatory policies or to hector
women into doing what they don't want to do.

In any case, what we do know about the sexes does not call for any action
that would penalize or constrain one sex or the other. Many psychological
traits relevant to the public sphere, such as general intelligence, are the same
on average for men and women, and virtually all psychological traits may be
found in varying degrees among the members of each sex. No sex difference
yet discovered applies to every last man compared with every last woman, so
generalizations about a sex will always be untrue of many individuals. And no¬
tions like "proper role" and "natural place” are scientifically meaningless and
give no grounds for restricting freedom.

Despite these principles, many feminists vehemently attack research on
sexuality and sex differences. The politics of gender is a major reason that the
application of evolution, genetics, and neuroscience to the human mind is bit¬
terly resisted in modern intellectual life. But unlike other human divisions such
as race and ethnicity, where any biological differences are minor at most and
scientifically uninteresting, gender cannot possibly be ignored in the science of
human beings. The sexes are as old as complex life and are a fundamental topic
in evolutionary biology, genetics, and behavioral ecology. To disregard them in
the case of our own species would be to make a hash of our understanding of
our place in the cosmos. And of course differences between men and women
affect every aspect of our lives. We all have a mother and a father, are attracted
to members of the opposite sex (or notice our contrast with the people who
are), and are never unaware of the sex of our siblings, children, and friends. To
ignore gender would be to ignore a major part of the human condition.

The goal of this chapter is to clarify the relation between the biology of
human nature and current controversies on the sexes,including the two most
incendiary, the gender gap and sexual assault. With both of these hot buttons,
I will argue against the conventional wisdom associated with certain people
who claim to speak on behalf of feminism. That may create an illusion that the

340 /Hot Buttons

arguments go against feminism in general, or even against the interests of
women. They don't in the least, and I must begin by showing why.

FEMINISM IS OFTEN derided because of the arguments of its lunatic fringe -
for example, that all intercourse is rape, that all women should be lesbians, or
that only 10 percent of the population should be allowed to be male." Femi¬
nists reply that proponents of women's rights do not speak with one voice, and
that feminist thought comprises many positions, which have to be evaluated
independently. loThat is completely legitimate, but it cuts both ways. To criti¬
cize a particular feminist proposal is not to attack feminism in general.

Anyone familiar with academia knows that it breeds ideological cults that
are prone to dogma and resistant to criticism. Many women believe that this
has now happened to feminism. In her book Who Stole Feminism? the philoso¬
pher Christina Hoff Sommers draws a useful distinction between, two schools
of thought, n Equity feminism opposes sex discrimination and other forms of
unfairness to women. It is part ofthe classical liberal and humanistic tradition
that grew out ofthe Enlightenment, and it guided the first wave of feminism
and launched the second wave. Gender feminism holds that women continue
to be enslaved by a pervasive system of male dominance, the gender system, in
which "bi-sexual infants are transformed into male and female gender per¬
sonalities, the one destined to command, the other to obey. "12 It is opposed to
the classical liberal tradition and allied instead with Marxism, postmod¬
ernism, social constructionism, and radical science. It has became the credo of
some women's studies programs, feminist organizations, and spokespeople
for the women's movement.

Equity feminism is a moral doctrine about equal treatment that makes no
commitments regarding open empirical issues in psychology or biology. Gen¬
der feminism is an empirical doctrine committed to three claims about
human nature. The first is that the differences between men and t^omen have
nothing to do with biology but are socially construc t.^<Lin their entirety. The
second is that humans possess a single social motive—frcwer 5 —and that social
life can be understood only in terms of how it is exercised. The third is that
human interactions arise not from-the motives of people dealing with each
other as individuals but from the motives of groups dealing with other
groups-in this case, the male gender dominating the female gender.

In embracing these doctrines, the genderists are handcuffing feminism to
railroad tracks on which a train is bearing down. As we shall see, neuroscience,
genetics, psychology, and ethnography are documenting sex differences that
almost certainly originate in human biology. And evolutionary psychology is
documenting a web of motives other than group-against-group dominance
(such as love, sex, family, and beauty) that entangle us in many conflicts and
confluences of interest with members of the same sex and of the opposite sex.

Gender/341

Gender feminists want either to derail the train or to have other women join
them in martyrdom, but the other women are not cooperating. Despite their
visibility, gender feminists do not speak for all feminists, let alone for all
women.

To begin with, research on the biological basis of sex differences has been
led by women. Because it is so often said that this research is a plot to keep
women down, 1 will have to name names. Researchers on the biology of sex
differences include the neuroscientists Raquel Gur, Melissa Hines, Doreen
Kimura, Ierre Levy, Martha McClintock, Sally Shaywitz, and Sandra Witelson
and the psychologists Camilla Benbow, Linda Gottfredson, Diane Halpern, Ju¬
dith Kleinfeld, and Diane McGuinness. Sociobiology and evolutionary psy¬
chology, sometimes stereotyped as a "sexist discipline," is perhaps the most
bi-gendered academic field I am familiar with. Its major figures include Laura
Betzig, Elizabeth Cashdan, Leda Cosmides, Helena Cronin, Mildred Dicke-
man, Helen Fisher, Patricia Gowaty, Kristen Hawkes, Sarah BlafferHrdy, Mag¬
dalena Hurtado, Bobbie Low, Linda Mealey, Felicia Pratto, Marnie Rice,
Catherine Salmon, Joan Silk, Meredith Small, Barbara Smuts, Nancy Wilmsen
Thornhill, and Margo Wilson. ,

It is not just gender feminism's collision with science that repels many
feminists. Fike other inbred ideologies, it has produced strange excrescences,
like the offshoot known as difference feminism. Carol Gilligan has become a
gender-feminist icon because of her claim that men and women guide their
moral reasoning by different principles: men think about rights and justice;
women have feelings of compassion, nurturing, and peaceful accommoda¬
tion." If true, it would disqualify women from becoming constitutional
lawyers. Supreme Court justices, and moral philosophers, who make their liv¬
ing by reasoning about rights and justice. But it is not true. Many studies have
tested Gilligan's hypothesis and found that men and women differ little or not
at all in their moral reasoning.lt-So difference feminism offers women the
worst of both worlds:lnvidious claims without scientific support. Similarly,
the gender-feminist cfassic called Women's Ways of Knowing claims that the
sexes differ in their styles of reasoning. Men value excellence and mastery in
intellectual matters and skeptically evaluate arguments in terms of logic and
evidence; women are spiritual, relational, inclusive, and credulous." With
sisters like these, who needs male chauvinists?

Gender feminism's disdain for analytical rigor and classical liberal princi¬
ples has recently been excoriated by equity feminists, among them lean Bethke
Elshtain, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Wendy Kaminer, Noretta Koertge, Donna
Laframboise, Mary Lefkowitz, Wendy McElroy, Camille Paglia, Daphne Patai,
Virginia Postrel. Alice Rossi, Sally Satel. Christina Hoff Sommers, Nadine
Strossen, Joan Kennedy Taylor, and Cathy Young .16 Well before them, promi¬
nent women writers demurred from gender-feminist ideology, including Joan

342 / Hot Buttons

Didion, Doris Lessing, Iris Murdoch, Cynthia Ozick, and Susan Sontag. nAnd
ominously for the movement, a younger generation has rejected the gender
feminists' claims that love, beauty, flirtation, erotica, art, and heterosexuality
are pernicious social constructs. The title of the book The New Victorians: A
Young Woman's Challenge to the OldFeminist Order captures the revolt of such
writers as Rene Denfeld, Karen Lehrman, Katie Roiphe, and Rebecca Walker,
and ofthe movements called Third Wave, Riot Grrrl Movement, Pro-Sex Fem¬
inism, Lipstick Lesbians, Girl Power, and Feminists for Free Expression. i8

The difference between gender feminism and equity feminism accounts
for the oft-reported paradox that most women do not consider themselves
feminists (about 70 percent in 1997, up from about 60 percent a decade be¬
fore), yet they agree with every major feminist position." The explanation is
simple: the word "feminist" is often associated with gender feminism, but the
positions in the polls are those of equity feminism. Faced with these signs of
slipping support, gender feminists have tried to stipulate that only they can be
considered the true advocates of women's rights. For example, in 1992 Gloria
Steinem said of Paglia,“Her calling herself a feminist is sort of like a Nazi say¬
ing they're not anti-Semitic."20 And they have invented a lexicon of epithets for
what in any other area would be called disagreement: "backlash:' “not getting
it:' "silencing women:"'intellectual harassment.'?'

All this is an essential background to the discussions to come. To say that
women and men do not have interchangeable minds, that people have desires
other than power, and that motives belong to individual people and not just to
entire genders is not to attack feminism or to compromise the interests of
women, despite the misconception that gender feminism speaks in their
name. All the arguments in the remainder of this chapter have been advanced
most forcefully by women.

WHY are people so afraid ofthe idea that the minds of men and women are
not identical in every respect? Would we really be better off if everyone were
like Pat, the androgynous nerd from Saturday Night Live? The fear, of course,
is that different implies unequal-that if the sexes differed in any way, then
men would have to be better, or more dominant, or have all the fun.

Nothing could be farther from biological thinking. Trivers alluded to a
"symmetry in human relationships:' which embraced a "genetic equality of
the sexes."22 From a gene's point of view, being in the body of a male and being
in the body of a female are equally good strategies, at least on average (cir¬
cumstances can nudge the advantage somewhat in either directionj.P Natural
selection thus tends toward an equal investment in the two sexes: equal num¬
bers, an equal complexity of bodies and brains, and equally effective designs
for survival. Is it better to be the size of a male baboon and have six-inch ca¬
nine teeth or to be the size of a female baboon and not have them? Merely to

Gender /343

ask the question is to reveal its pointlessness. A biologist would say that it's bet¬
ter to have the male adaptations to deal with male problems and the female
adaptations to deal with female problems.

So men are not from Mars, nor are women from Venus. Men and women
are from Africa, the cradle of our evolution, where they evolved together as a
single species. Men and women have all the same genes except for a handful on
the Y chromosome, and their brains are so similar that it takes an eagle-eyed
neuroanatomist to find the small differences between them. Their average lev¬
els of general intelligence are the same, according to the best psychometric es¬
timates," and they use language and think about the physical and living world
in the same general way. They feel the same basic emotions, and both enjoy
sex, seek intelligent and kind marriage partners, get jealous, make sacrifices for
their children, compete for status and mates, and sometimes commit aggres¬
sion in pursuit of their interests.

But of course the minds of men and women are not identical, and recent
reviews of sex differences have converged on some reliable differences."
Sometimes the differences are large, with only slight overlap in the bell curves.
Men have a much stronger taste for no-strings sex with multiple or anony¬
mous partners, as we see in the almost all-male consumer base for prostitution
and visual pornography," Men are far more likely to compete violently, some¬
times lethally, with one another over stakes great and small (as in the recent
case of a surgeon and an anesthesiologist who came to blows in the operating
room while a patient lay on the table waiting to have her gall bladder re-
movedj.i" Among children, boys spend far more time practicing for violent
conflict in the form of what psychologists genteelly call "rough-and-tumble
play.»28 The ability to manipulate three-dimensional objects and space in the
mind also shows a large difference in favor of men. 29

With some other traits the differences are small on average but can be
large at the extremes. That happens for two reasons. When two bell curves
partly overlap, the farther out along the tail you go, the larger the discrepancies
between the groups. For example, men on average are taller than women, and
the discrepancy is greater for more extreme values. At a height of five foot ten,
men outnumber women by a ratio of thirty to one; at a height of six feet, men
outnumber women by a ratio of two thousand to one. Also, confirming an ex¬
pectation from evolutionary psychology, for many traits the bell curve for
males is flatter and wider than the curve for females. That is, there are propor¬
tionally more males at the extremes. Along the left tail of the curve, one finds
that boys are far more likely to be dyslexic, learning disabled, attention defi¬
cient, emotionally disturbed, and mentally retarded (at least for some types of
retardationl.'" At the right tail, one finds that in a sample of talented students
who score above 700 (out of 800) on the mathematics section of the Scholas-

344/Hot Buttons

tic Assessment Test, boys outnumber girls by thirteen to one, even though the
scores of boys and girls are similar within the bulk of the curve."

With still other traits, the average values for the two sexes differ by smaller
amounts and in different directions for different traits." Though men, on av¬
erage, are better at mentally rotating objects and maps, women are better at re¬
membering landmarks and the positions of objects. Men are better throwers;
women are more dexterous. Men are better at solving mathematical word
problems, women at mathematical calculation. Women are more sensitive to
sounds and smells, have better depth perception, match shapes faster, and are
much better at reading facial expressions and body language. Women are bet¬
ter spellers, retrieve words more fluently, and have a better memory for verbal
material.

Women experience basic emotions more intensely, except perhaps
anger," Women have more intimate social relationships, are more concerned
about them, and feel more empathy toward their friends, though not toward
strangers. (The common view that women are more empathic toward every¬
one is both evolutionarily unlikely and untrue.) They maintain more eye con¬
tact, and smile and laugh far more often." Men are more likely to compete
with one another for status using violence or occupational achievement,
women more likely to use derogation and other forms of verbal aggression.

Men have a higher tolerance for pain and a greater willingness to risk life
and limb for status, attention, and other dubious rewards. The Darwin
Awards, given annually to “the individuals who ensure the long-term survival
of our species by removing themselves from the gene pool in a sublimely idi¬
otic fashion;' almost always go to men. Recent honorees include the man who
squashed himself under a Coke machine after tipping it forward to get a free
can, three men who competed over who could stomp the hardest on an anti¬
tank mine, and the would-be pilot who tied weather balloons to his lawn chair,
shot two miles into the air, and drifted out to sea (earning just an Honorable
Mention because he was rescued by helicopter).

Women are more attentive to their infants' everyday cries (though both
sexes respond equally to cries of extreme distress) and are more solicitous to¬
ward their children in general." Girls play more at parenting and trying on so¬
cial roles, boys more at fighting, chasing, and manipulating objects. And men
and women differ in their patterns of sexual jealousy, their mate preferences,
and their incentives to philander.

Many sex differences, of course, have nothing to do with biology. Hair
styles and dress vary capriciously across centuries and cultures, and in recent
decades participation in universities, professions, and sports has switched
from mostly male to fifty-fifty or mostly female. For all we know, some of the
current sex differences may be just as ephemeral. But gender feminists argue

Gender / 345

that all sex differences, other than the anatomical ones, come from the expec¬
tations of parents, playmates, and society. The radical scientist Anne Fausto-
Sterling wrote:

The key biological fact is that boys and girls have different genitalia, and
it is this biological difference that leads adults to interact differently with
different babies whom we conveniently color-code in pink or blue to
make it unnecessary to go peering into their diapers for information
about gender."

But the pink-and-blue theory is becoming less and less credible. Here are a
dozen kinds of evidence that suggest that the difference between men and
women is more than genitalia-deep.

• Sex differences are not an arbitrary feature of Western culture, like the de¬
cision to drive on the left or on the right. In all human cultures, men and
women are seen as having different natures. All cultures divide their labor
by sex, with more responsibility for childrearing by women and more con¬
trol of the public and political realms by men. (The division of labor
emerged even in a culture where everyone had been committed to stamp¬
ing it out, the Israeli kibbutz.) In all cultures men are more aggressive,
more prone to stealing, more prone to lethal violence (including war), and
more likely to woo, seduce, and trade favors for sex. And in all cultures one
finds rape, as well as proscriptions against rape."

• Many of the psychological differences between the sexes are exactly what
an evolutionary biologist who knew only their physical differences would
predict." Throughout the animal kingdom, when the female has to invest
more calories and risk in each offspring (in the case of mammals, through
pregnancy and nursing), she also invests more in nurturing the offspring
after birth, since it is more costly for a female to replace a child than for a
male to replace one. The difference in investment is accompanied by a
greater competition among males over opportunities to mate, since mat¬
ing with many partners is more likelyto multiply the number of offspring
of a male than the number of offspring of a female. When the average
male is larger than the average female (as is true of men and women), it
bespeaks an evolutionary history of greater violent competition by males
over mating opportunities. Other physical traits of men, such as later pu¬
berty, greater adult strength, and shorter lives, also indicate a history of se¬
lection for high-stakes competition.

• Many of the sex differences are found widely in other primates, indeed,
throughout the mammalian class." The males tend to compete more ag¬
gressively and to be more polygamous; the females tend to invest more in

346/Hot Buttons

parenting. In many mammals a greater territorial range is accompanied
by an enhanced ability to navigate using the geometry of the spatial layout
(as opposed to remembering individual landmarks). More often it is the
male who has the greater range, and that is true of human hunter-
gatherers. Men's advantage in using mental maps and performing 3-f)
mental rotation may not be a coincidence."

• Geneticists have found that the diversity of the DNA in the mitochondria
of different people (which men and women inherit from their mothers) is
far greater than the diversity of the DNA in Y chromosomes (which men
inherit from their fathers). This suggests that for tens of millennia men
had greater variation in their reproductive success than women. Some
men had many descendants and others had none (leaving us with a small
number of distinct Y chromosomes), whereas a larger number of women
had a more evenly distributed number of descendants (leaving us with a
larger number of distinct mitochondrial genomes). These are precisely
the conditions that cause sexual selection, in which males compete for op¬
portunities to mate and females choose the best-quality males."

• The human body contains a mechanism that causes the brains ofboys and
the brains of girls to diverge during development.F The Y chromosome
triggers the growth of testes in a male fetus, which secrete androgens, the
characteristically male hormones (including testosterone). Androgens
have lasting effects on the brain during fetal development, in the months
after birth, and during puberty, and they have transient effects at other
times. Estrogens, the characteristically female sex hormones, also affect
the brain throughout life.Receptors for the sexhormones are found in the
'hypothalamus, the hippocampus, and the amygdala in the limbic system
of the brain, as well as in the cerebral cortex.

• The brains of men differ visibly from the brains of women in several
ways." Men have larger brains with more neurons (even correcting for
body size), though women have a higher percentage of gray matter. (Since
men and women are equally intelligent overall, the significance of these
differences is unknown.) The interstitial nuclei in the anterior hypothala¬
mus, and a nucleus of the stria terminalis, also in the hypothalamus, are
larger in men; they have been implicated in sexual behavior and aggres¬
sion. Portions of the cerebral commissures, which link the left and right
hemispheres, appear to be larger in women, and their brains may function
in a less lopsided manner than men's. Learning and socialization can affect
the microstructure and functioning of the human brain, of course, but
probably not the size of its visible anatomical structures.

• Variation in the level of testosterone among different men, and in the
same man in different seasons or at different times of day, correlates with
libido, self-confidence, and the drive for dominance.r' Violent criminals

Gender / 347

have higher levels than nonviolent criminals; trial lawyers have higher lev¬
els than those who push paper. The relations are complicated for a num¬
ber of reasons. Over a broad range of values, the concentration of
testosterone in the bloodstream doesn't matter. Some traits, such as spatial
abilities, peak at moderate rather than high levels. The effects of testos¬
terone depend on the number and distribution of receptors for the mole¬
cule, not just on its concentration. And one's psychological state can affect
testosterone levels as well as the other way around. But there is a causal re¬
lation, albeit a complicated one. When women preparing for a sex-change
operation are given androgens, they improve on tests of mental rotation
and get worse on tests of verbal fluency. The journalist Andrew Sullivan,
whose medical condition had lowered his testosterone levels, describes the
effects of injecting it: "The rush of a T shot is not unlike the rush of going
on a first date or speaking before an audience. I feel braced. After one in¬
jection, I almost got in a public brawl for the first time in my life. There is
always a lust peak-every time it takes me unaware."45 Though testos¬
terone levels in men and women do not overlap, variations in level have
similar kinds of effects in the two sexes. High-testosterone women smile
less often and have more extramarital affairs, a stronger social presence,
and even a stronger handshake.

• Women's cognitive strengths and weaknesses vary with the phase of their
menstrual cycle.46 When estrogen levels are high, women get even better at
tasks on which they typically do better than men, such as verbal fluency.
When the levels are low, women get better at tasks on which men typically
do better, such as mental rotation. A variety of sexual motives, including
their taste in men, vary with the menstrual cycle as well.47

• Androgens have permanent effects on the developing brain, not just tran¬
sient effects on the adult brain." Girls with congenital adrenal hyperpla¬
sia overproduce androstenedione, the androgen hormone made famous
by the baseball slugger Mark McGwire. Though their hormone levels are
brought to normal soon after birth, the girls grow into tomboys, with
more rough-and-tumble play, a greater interest in trucks than dolls, better
spatial abilities, and, when they get older, more sexual fantasies and at¬
tractions involving other girls. Those who are treated with hormones only
later in childhood show male patterns of sexuality when they become
young adults, including quick arousal by pornographic images, an au¬
tonomous sex drive centered on genital stimulation, and the equivalent of
wet dreams."

• The ultimate fantasy experiment to separate biology from socialization
would be to take a baby boy, give him a sex-change operation, and have his
parents raise him as a girl and other people treat him as one. If gender is
socially constructed, the child should have the mind of a normal girl; if it

348/Hot Buttons

depends on prenatal hormones, the child should feel like a boy trapped in
a girl's body. Remarkably, the experiment has been done in real life-not
out of scientific curiosity, of course, but as a result of disease and acci¬
dents. One study looked at twenty-five boys who were born without a
penis (a birth defect known as cloacal exstrophy) and who were then cas¬
trated and raised as girls. All of them showed male patterns of rough-and-
tumble play and had typically male attitudes and interests. More than half
of them spontaneously declared they were boys, one when he was just five
years old.50

In a famous case study, an eight-month-old boy lost his penis in a
botched circumcision (not by a mohel, I was relieved to learn, but by a
bungling doctor). His parents consulted the famous sex researcher John
Money, who had maintained,that "Nature is a political strategy of those
committed to maintaining the status quo of sex differences." He advised
them to let the doctors castrate the baby and build him an artificial vagina,
and they raised him as a girl without telling him what had happened.51 I
learned about the case as an undergraduate in the 1970s, when it was of¬
fered as proof that babies are born neuter and acquire a gender from the
way they are raised. A New York Times article from the era reported that
Brenda (nee Bruce) “has been sailing contentedly through childhood as a
genuine girl:'52 The facts were suppressed until 1997, when it was revealed
that from a young age Brenda felt she was a boy trapped in a girl's body
and gender role.53 She ripped off frilly dresses, rejected dolls in favor of
guns, preferred to play with boys, and even insisted on urinating standing
up. At fourteen she was so miserable that she decided either to live her life
as a male or to end it, and her father finally told her the truth. She under¬
went a new set of operations, assumed a male identity, and today is hap¬
pily married to a woman.

• Children with Turner's syndrome are genetically neuter. They have a sin¬
gle X chromosome, inherited from either their mother or their father, in¬
stead of the usual two X chromosomes of a girl (one from her mother, the
other from her father) or the X and Y of a boy (the X from his mother, the
Y from his father). Since a female body plan is the default among mam¬
mals, they look and act like girls. Geneticists have discovered that parents'
bodies can molecularly imprint genes on the X chromosome so they be¬
come more or less active in the developing bodies and brains of their chil¬
dren. A Turner's syndrome girl who gets her X chromosome from her
father may have genes that are evolutionarily optimized for girls (since a
paternal X always ends up in a daughter). A Turner's girl who gets her X
from her mother may have genes that are evolutionarily optimized for
boys (since a maternal X, though it can end up in either sex, will act un¬
opposed only in a son, who has no counterpart to the X genes on his puny

Gender /349

Y chromosome). And in fact Turner's girls do differ psychologically de¬
pending on which parent gave them their X. The ones with an X from
their father (which is destined for a girl) were better at interpreting body
language, reading emotions, recognizing faces, handling words, and get¬
ting along with other people compared to the ones with an X from their
mother (which is fully active only in a boy). 54
• Contrary to popular belief, parents in contemporary America do not
treat their sons and daughters very differently. 55 A recent assessment of
172 studies involving 28,000 children found that boys and girls are given
similar amounts of encouragement, warmth, nurturance, restrictiveness,
discipline, and clarity of communication. The only substantial difference
was that about two-thirds of the boys were discouraged from playing
with dolls, especially by their fathers, out of a fear that they would be¬
come gay. (Boys who prefer girls' toys often do turn out gay, but forbid¬
ding them the toys does not change the outcome.) Nor do differences
between boys and girls depend on their observing masculine behavior in
their fathers and feminine behavior in their mothers. When Hunter has
two mommies, he acts just as much like a boy as if he had a mommy and
a daddy.

Things are not looking good for the theory that boys and girls are born
identical except for their genitalia, with all other differences coming from
the way society treats them. If that were true, it would be an amazing coinci¬
dence that in every society the coin flip that assigns each sex to one set of
roles would land the same way (or that one fateful flip at the dawn of the
species should have been maintained without interruption across all the up¬
heavals of the past hundred thousand years). It would be just as amazing
that, time and again, society's arbitrary assignments matched the predictions
that a Martian biologist would make for our species based on our anatomy
and the distribution of our genes. It would seem odd that the hormones that
make us male and female in the first place also modulate the characteristi¬
cally male and female mental traits, both decisively in early brain develop¬
ment and in smaller degrees throughout our lives. It would be all the more
odd that a second genetic mechanism differentiating the sexes (genomic im¬
printing) also installs characteristic male and female talents. Finally, two key
predictions of the social construction theory-that boys treated as girls will
grow up with girls' minds, and that differences between boys and girls can be
traced to differences in how their parents treat them-have gone down in
flames.

Of course, just because many sex differences are rooted in biology does
not mean that one sex is superior, that the differences will emerge for all peo-

350 /Hot Buttons

pie in all circumstances, that discrimination against a person based on, sex is
justified, or that people should be coerced into doing things typical of their
sex. But neither are the differences without consequences.

By now many people are happy to say what was unsayable in polite company
a few years ago: that males and females do not have interchangeable minds.
Even the comic pages have commented on the shift in the debate, as we see in
this dialogue between the free-associating, junkfood-loving Zippy and the
cartoonist's alter ego Griffy:

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Ee«T «i«MT J -

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while ms tv*j
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© Bill Griffith. Reprinted with special permission of King Features Syndicate.

But among many professional women the existence of sex differences is still
a source of discomfort. As one colleague said to me, "Look, I know that males
and females are not identical. I see it in my kids, I see it in myself, I know about
the research. I can't explain it, but when I read claims about sex differences,
steam comes out of my ears:' The most likely cause of her disquiet is captured
in a recent editorial by Betty Friedan, the cofounder of the National Organi¬
zation for Women and the author of the 1963 book The Feminine Mystique:

Though the women's movement has begun to achieve equality for
women on many economic and political measures, the victory remains
incomplete. To take two of the simplest and most obvious indicators:
women still earn no more than 72 cents for every dollar that men earn,
and we are nowhere near equality in numbers at the very top of decision
making in business, government, or the professions.56

Like Friedan, many people believe that the gender gap in wages and a "glass
ceiling" that keeps women from rising to the uppermostlevelsofpower are the
two main injustices facing women in the West today. In his 1999 State of the
Union address, Bill Clinton said, "We can be proud of this progress, but 75
cents on the dollar is still only three-quarters of the way there, and Americans

Gender / 351

can't be satisfied until we're all the way there." The gender gap and the glass ceil¬
ing have inspired lawsuits against companies that have too few women in the
top positions, pressure on the government to regulate all salaries so men and
women are paid according to the «comparable worth" of their jobs, and ag¬
gressive measures to change girls' attitudes to the professions, such as the an¬
nual Take Our Daughters to Work Day.

Scientists and engineers face the issue in the form of the “leaky pipeline:'
Though women make up almost 60 percent of university students and about
half of the students majoring in many fields of science, the proportion ad¬
vancing to the next career stage diminishes as they go from being undergrad¬
uates to graduate students to postdoctoral fellows to junior professors to
tenured professors. Women make up less than 20 percent of the workforce in
science, engineering, and technology development, and only 9 percent of the
workforce in engineering. 57 Readers of the flagship journals Science and Na¬
ture have seen two decades of headlines such as "Diversity: Easier Said Than
Done" and "Efforts to Boost Diversity Face Persistent Problemsr"" A typical
story, commenting on the many national commissions set up to investigate the
problem, said, "These activities are meant to continue chipping away at a
problem that, experts say,begins with negative messages in elementary school,
continues through undergraduate and graduate programs that erect barri-
ers-financial, academic, and cultural-to all but the best candidates, and
persists into the workplace."? A meeting in 2001 ofthe presidents ofnine elite
American universities called for "significant changes;' such as setting aside
grants and fellowships for women faculty, giving them the best parking spaces
on campus, and ensuring that the percentage ofwomen faculty equals the per¬
centage of women students/"

But there is something odd in these stories about negative messages, hid¬
den barriers, and gender prejudices. The way of science is to layout every hy¬
pothesis that could account for a phenomenon and to eliminate all but the
correct one. Scientists prize the ability to think up alternative explanations,
and proponents of a hypothesis are expected to refute even the unlikely ones.
Nonetheless, discussions of the leaky pipeline in science rarely even mention
an alternative to the theory of barriers and bias. One ofthe rare exceptions was
a sidebar to a 2000 story in Science, which quoted from a presentation at the
National Academy of Engineering by the social scientist Patti Hausman:

The question of why more women don't choose careers in engineering
has a rather obvious answer: Because they don't want to. Wherever you
go, you will find females far less likely than males to see what is so fasci¬
nating about ohms, carburetors, or quarks. Reinventing the .curriculum
will not make me more interested in learning how my dishwasher
works."

352 / Hot Buttons

An eminent woman engineer in the audience immediately denounced her
analysis as "pseudoscience." But Linda Gottfredson, an expert in the literature
on vocational preferences, pointed out that Hausman had the data on her side:

" On average, women are more interested in dealing with people and men with
things:'Vocational tests also show that boys are more interested in "realistic:'
"theoretical:' and "investigative" pursuits, and girls more interested in "artis¬
tic" and "social" pursuits.

Hausman and Gottfredson are lonely voices, because the gender gap is al¬
most always analyzed in the following way. Any imbalance between men and
women in their occupations or earnings is direct proof of gender bias-ifnot
in the form of overt discrimination, then in the form of discouraging messages
and hidden barriers. The possibility that men and women might differ from
each other in ways that affect what jobs they hold or how much they get paid
may never be mentioned in public, because it will set back the cause of equity
in the workplace and harm the interests of women. 11 is this conviction that led
Friedan and Clinton, for example, to say that we will not have attained gender
equity until earnings and representation in the professions are identical for
men and women. In a 1998 television interview, Gloria Steinem and the con¬
gresswoman Bella Abzug called the very idea of sex differences "poppycock"
and "anti-American crazy thinking:' and when Abzug was asked whether gen¬
der equality meant equal numbers in every field, she replied, "Fifty-fifty-
absolutely'Y This analysis of the gender gap has also become the official
position of universities. That the presidents of the nation's elite universities are
happy to accuse their colleagues of shameful prejudice without even consider¬
ing alternative explanations (whether or not they would end up accepting
them) shows how deeply rooted the taboo is.

The problem with this analysis is that inequality of outcome cannot be
used as proof of inequality of opportunity unless the groups being compared
are identical in all of their psychological traits, which is likely to be true only if
we are blank slates. But the suggestion that the gender gap may arise, even in
part, from differences between the sexes can be fightin' words. Anyone bring¬
ing it up is certain to be accused of "wanting to keep women in their place" or
"justifying the status quo:'This makes about asmuchsense as saying that a sci¬
entist who studies why women live longer than men "wants old men to die."
And far from being a ploy by self-serving men, analyses exposing the flaws of
the glass-ceiling theory have largely come from women, including Hausman,
Gottfredson, Judith Kleinfeld, Karen Lehrman, Cathy Young, and Camilla
Benbow, the economists Jennifer Roback, Felice Schwartz, Diana Furchtgott-
Roth, and Christine Stolba, the legal scholar Jennifer Braceras, and, more
guardedly, the economist Claudia Goldin and the legal scholar Susan Estrich."

1 believe these writers have given us a better understanding of the gender
gap than the standard one, for a number ofreasons. Their analysis is not afraid

Gender / 353

of the possibility that the sexes might differ, and therefore does not force us to
choose between scientific findings on human nature and the fair treatment of
women. It offers a more sophisticated understanding of the causes of the gen¬
der gap, one that is consistent with our best social science. It takes a more re¬
spectful view of women and their choices. And ultimately it promises more
humane and effective remedies for gender inequities in the workplace.

Before presenting the new analysis of the gender gap from equity femi¬
nists, let me reiterate three points that are not in dispute. First, discouraging
women from pursuing their ambitions, and discriminating against them on
the basis of their sex, are injustices that should be stopped wherever they are
discovered.

Second, there is no doubt that women faced widespread discrimination in
the past and continue to face it in some sectors today. This cannot be proven
by showing that men earn more than women or that the sex ratio departs from
fifty-fifty,but it can be proven in other ways. Experimenters can send out fake
resumes or grant proposals that are identical in all ways except the sex of the
applicant and see whether they are treated differently. Economists can do a re¬
gression analysis that takes measures of people's qualifications and interests
and determines whether the men and the women earn different amounts, or
are promoted at different rates, when their qualifications and interests are sta¬
tistically held constant. The point that differences in outcome don't show dis¬
crimination unless one has equated for other relevant traits is elementary
social science (not to mention common sense), and is accepted by all econo¬
mists when they analyze data sets looking for evidence of wage discrimina¬
tion."

Third, there is no question of whether women are “qualified” to be scien¬
tists, CEOs, leaders of nations, or elite professionals of any other kind. That
was decisively answered years ago: some are and some aren't, just as some men
are qualified and some aren't. Theonly question is whether the proportions of
qualified men and women must be identical.

M&tft many other topics related to human nature, people’s unwillingness
to think m Statistical terms has led to pointless false dichotomies, Here is how

to think about gender distributions in the professions without having to
choose between the extremes of “women are unqualified" and «fifty-fifty ab¬
solutely;' or between «there is no discrimination" and "there is nothing but dis¬
crimination."

In a free and unprejudiced labor market, people will be hired and paid ac¬
cording to the match between their traits and the demands of the job. A given
job requires some mixture of cognitive talents (such as mathematical or lin¬
guistic skill), personality traits (such as risk taking or cooperation), and toler¬
ance of lifestyle demands (rigid schedules, relocations, updating job skills).
And it offers some mixture of personal rewards: people, gadgets, ideas, the

354/Hot Buttons

outdoors, pride in workmanship. The salary is influenced, among other
things, by supply and demand: how many people want the job, how many can
do it, and how many the employer can pay to do it. Readily filled jobs may pay
less; difficult-to-fill jobs may pay more.

People vary in the traits relevant to employment. Most people can think
logically, work with people, tolerate conflict or unpleasant surroundings, and
so on, but not to an identical extent; everyone has a unique profile of strengths
and tastes. Given all the evidence for sex differences (some biological, some
cultural, some both), the statistical distributions for men and women in these
strengths and tastes are unlikely to be identicaL If one now matches the distri¬
bution of traits for men and for women with the distribution of the demands
of the jobs in. the economy, the chance that the proportion of men and of
women in each profession will be identical, or that the mean salary of men and
of women will be identical, is very close to zero-even if there were no barri¬
ers or discrimination.

None of this implies that women will end up with the short end of the
stick. It depends on the menu of opportunities that a given society makes
available. If there are more high-paying jobs that call for typical male strengths
(say, willingness to put oneself in physical danger, or an interest in machines),
men may do better on average; if there are more that call for typical female
strengths (say, a proficiency with language, or an interest in people), women
may do better on average. In either case, members of both sexes will be found
in both kinds of jobs, just in different numbers. That is why some relatively
prestigious professions are dominated by women. An example is my own field,
the study of language development in children, in which women outnumber
men by a large margin." In her book The First Sex: The Natural Talents of
Women and Flow They Are Changing the World , the anthropologist Helen
Fisher speculates that the culture of business in our knowledge-driven, global¬
ized economy will soon favorwomen. Women are more articulate and coop¬
erative, are not as obsessed with rank, and are better able to negotiate win-win
outcomes. The workplaces of the new century, she predicts, will increasingly
demand these talents, and women may surpass men in status and earnings.

In today's world, of course, the gap favors men. Some of the gap is caused
by discrimination. Employers may underestimate the skills of women, or as¬
sume that an all-male workplace is more efficient, or worry that their male
employees will resent female supervisors, or fear resistance from prejudiced
customers and clients. But the evidence suggests that not all sex differences in
the professions are caused by these barriers." It is unlikely, for example, that
among academics the mathematicians are unusually biased against women,
the developmental psycholinguists are unusually biased against men, and the
evolutionary psychologists are unusually free of bias.

In a few professions, differences in ability may play some role. The fact that

Gender/355

more men than women have exceptional abilities in mathematical reasoning
and in mentally manipulating 3-D objects is enough to explain a departure
from a fifty-fifty sex ratio among engineers, physicists, organic chemists, and
professors in some branches of mathematics (though of course it does not
mean that the proportion of women should be anywhere near zero).

In most professions, average differences in ability are irrelevant, but aver¬
age differences in preferences may set the sexes on different paths. The most
dramatic example comes from an analysis by David Lubinski and Camilla
Benbow of a sample of mathematically precocious seventh-graders selected in
a nationwide talent search." The teenagers were born during the second wave
of feminism, were encouraged by their parents to develop their talents (all
were sent to summer programs in math and science), and were fully aware of
their ability to achieve. But the gifted girls told the researchers that they were
more interested in people, "social values;' and humanitarian and altruistic
goals, whereas the gifted boys said they were more interested in things, "theo¬
retical values;' and abstract intellectual inquiry. In college, the young women
chose a broad range of courses in the humanities, arts, and sciences, whereas
the boys were geeks who stuck to math and science. And sure enough, fewer
than 1 percent of the young women pursued doctorates in math, physical sci¬
ences, or engineering, whereas 8 percent of the young men did. The women
went into medicine, law, the humanities, and biology instead.

This asymmetry is writ large in massive surveys of job-related values and
career choices, another kind of study in which men and women actually say
what they want rather than having activists speak for them/" On average,
men’s self-esteem is more highly tied to their status, salary, and wealth, and so
is their attractiveness as a sexual partner and marriage partner, as revealed in
studies of what people look for in the opposite sex."? Not surprisingly, men say
they are more keen to work longer hours and to sacrifice other parts of their
lives-to live in a less attractive city, or to leave friends and family when they
relocate-in order to climb the corporate ladder or achieve notoriety in their
fields. Men, on average, are also more willing to undergo physical discomfort
and danger, and thus are more likely to be found in grungy but relatively lu¬
crative jobs such as repairing factory equipment, working on oil rigs, and jack-
hammering sludge from the inside of oil tanks. Women, on average, are more
likely to choose administrative support jobs that offer lower pay in air-
conditioned offices. Men are greater risk takers, and that is reflected in their
career paths even when qualifications are held constant. Men prefer to work
for corporations, women for government agencies and nonprofit organiza¬
tions. Male doctors are more likely to specialize and to open up private prac¬
tices; female doctors are more likely to be general practitioners on salary in
hospitals and clinics. Men are more likely to be managers in factories, women
more likely to be managers in human resources or corporate communications.

3 5 6/Hot Buttons

Mothers are more attached to their children, on average, than are fathers.
That is true in societies all over the world and probably has been true of our
lineage since the first mammals evolved some two hundred million years ago.
As Susan Estrich puts it, "Waiting for the connection between gender and par¬
enting to be broken is waiting for Godot." This does not mean that women in
any society have ever been uninterested in work; among hunter-gatherers,
women do most of the gathering and some of the hunting, especially when it
involves nets rather than rocks and spears." Nor does it mean that men in any
society are indifferent to their children; male parental investment is a conspic¬
uous and zoologically unusual feature of Homo sapiens. But it does mean that
the biologically ubiquitous tradeoff between investing in a child and working
to stay healthy (ultimately to beget or invest in other children) may be bal¬
anced at different points by males and females. Not only are women the sex
who nurse, but women are more attentive to their babies' well-being and, in
surveys, place a higher value on spending time with their children."

So even if both sexes value work and both sexes value children, the differ¬
ent weightings may lead women, more often than men, to make career choices
that allow them to spend more time with their children-shorter or more flex¬
ible hours, fewer relocations, skills that don't become obsolete as quickly-in
exchange for lower wages or prestige. As the economist Jennifer Roback points
out, "Once we observe that people sacrifice money income for other pleasur¬
able things we can infer next to nothing by comparing the income of one per¬
son with another's,"? The economist Gary Becker has shown that marriage
can magnify the effects of sex differences, even if they are small to begin with,
because of what economists call the law of comparative advantage. In couples
where the husband can earn a bit more than the wife, but the wife is a some¬
what better parent than the husband, they might rationally decide they are
both better off if she works less than he does."

Torepeat: none ofthis means that sex discrimination has vanished, or that
it is justified when it occurs. The point is only that gender gaps by themselves
say nothing about discrimination unless the slates of men and women are
blank, which they are not. The only way to establish discrimination is to com¬
pare their jobs or wages when choices and qualifications are equalized. And in
fact a recent study of data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth
found that childless women between the ages of twenty-seven and thirty-three
earn 98 cents to men's dollar." Even to people who are cynical about the mo¬
tivations of American employers, this should come as no shock. In a cutthroat
market, any company stupid enough to overlook qualified women or to over¬
pay unqualified men would be driven out of business by a more meritocratic
competitor.

Now, there is nothing in science or social science that would rule out poli¬
cies implementing a fifty-fifty distribution of wages and jobs between the sexes,

Gender /357

if a democracy decided that this was an inherently worthy goal. What the find¬
ings do say is that such policies will come with costs as well as benefits. The ob¬
vious benefit of equality-of-outcome policies is that they might neutralize the
remaining discrimination against women. But if men and women are not inter¬
changeable, the costs have to be considered as well.

Some costs would be borne by men or by both sexes. The two most obvi¬
ous are the possibility of reverse discrimination against men and of a false pre¬
sumption of sexism among the men and women who make decisions about
hiring and salary today. Another cost borne by both sexes is the inefficiency
that could result if employment decisions were based on factors other than the
best match between the demands of a job and the traits of the person.

But many of the costs of equality-of-outcome policies would be borne by
women. Many women scientists are opposed to hard gender preferences in sci¬
ence, such as designated faculty positions for women, or the policy (advocated
by one activist) in which federal research grants would be awarded in exact
proportion to the number of men and women who apply for them. The prob¬
lem with these well-meaning policies is that they can plant seeds of doubt in
people's minds about the excellence of the beneficiaries. As the astronomer
Lynne Hillenbrand said, “If you're given an opportunity for the reason of
being female, it doesn't do anyone any favors; it makes people question why
you're there."75

Certainly there are institutional barriers to the advancement of women.
People are mammals, and we should think through the ethical implications of
the fact that it is women who bear, nurse, and disproportionately raise chil¬
dren. One ought not to assume that the default human being is a man and that
children are an indulgence or an accident that strikes a deviant subset. Sex dif¬
ferences therefore can be used to justify, rather than endanger, woman-
friendly policies such as parental leave, subsidized childcare, flexible hours,
and stoppages of the tenure clock or the elimination of tenure altogether (a
possibility recently broached by the biologist and Princeton University presi¬
dent Shirley Tilghman).

Of course, there is no such thing as a free lunch, and these policies are also
decisions-perhaps justifiable ones-to penalize men and women who are
childless, have grown children, or choose to stay at home with their children.
But even when it comes to weighing these tradeoffs, thinking about human
nature can raise (Jeep new questions that could ultimately improve the lot of
working women. Which of the onerous job demands that deter women really
contribute to economic efficiency, and which are obstacle courses in which
men compete for alpha status? In reasoning about fairness in the workplace,
should we consider people as isolated individuals, or should we consider them
as members of families who probably will have children at some point in their
lives and who probably will care for aging parents at some point in their lives?

358/Hot Buttons

If we trade off some economic efficiency for more pleasant working condi¬
tions in all jobs, might there be a net increase in happiness? I don't have an¬
swers, but the questions are well worth asking.

There is one more reason that acknowledging sex differences can be more
humane than denying them. 11 is men and women, not the male gender and the
female gender, who prosper or suffer, and those men and women are endowed
with brains-perhaps not identical brains-that give them values and an abil¬
ity to make choices. Those choices should be respected. A regular feature of the
lifestyle pages is the story about women who are made to feel ashamed about
staying at home with their children. As they always say, “I thought feminism
was supposed to be about choices." The same should apply to women who do
choose to work but also to trade off some income in order to "have a life" (and,
of course, to men who make that choice). It is not obviously progressive to in¬
sist that equal numbers of men and women work eighty-hour weeks in a cor¬
porate law firm or leave their families for months at a time to' dodge steel pipes
on a frigid oil platform. And it is grotesque to demand (as advocates of gender
parity did in the pages of Science) that more young women "be conditioned to
choose engineering;' as if they were rats in a Skinner box."

Gottfredson points out, "Ifyou insist on using gender parity as your mea¬
sure of social justice, it means you will have to keep many men and women out
of the work they like best and push them into work they don't like,"? She is
echoed by Kleinfeld on the leaky pipeline in science: "We should not be send¬
ing [gifted] women the messages that they are less worthy human beings, less
valuable to our civilization, lazy or low in status, if they choose to be teachers
rather than mathematicians, journalists rather than physicists, lawyers rather
than engineers."! These are not hypothetical worries: a recent survey by the
National Science Foundation found that many more women than men say
they majored in science, mathematics, or engineering under pressure from
teachers or family members rather than to pursue their own aspirations-and
that many eventually switched out for that reason." I will give the final word
to Margaret Mead, who, despite being wrong in her early career about the mal¬
leability of gender, was surely right when she said, "If we are to achieve a richer
culture, rich in contrasting values, we must recognize the whole gamut of
human potentialities, and so weave a less arbitrary social fabric, one in which
each diverse human gift will find a fitting place."

other than the gender gap, the most combustible recent issue surround¬
ing the sexes has been the nature and causes of rape. When the biologist Randy
Thornhill and the anthropologist Craig Palmer published A Natural History of
Rape in 2000, they threatened a consensus that had held firm in intellectual life
for a quarter of a century, and they brought down more condemnation on
evolutionary psychology than-any issue had in years." Rape is a painful issue

Gender / 359

to write about, but also an unavoidable one. Nowhere else in modern intellec-
tuallife is the denial of human nature more passionately insisted upon, and
nowhere else is the alternative more deeply misunderstood. Clarifying these
issues, I believe, would go a long way toward reconciling three ideals that have
needlessly been put into conflict: women's rights, a biologically informed un¬
derstanding of human nature, and common sense.

The horror of rape gives it a special gravity in our understanding of the
psychology of men and women. There is an overriding moral imperative in
the study of rape: to reduce its occurrence. Any scientist who illuminates the
causes of rape deserves our admiration, like a medical researcher who illumi¬
nates the cause of a disease, because understanding an affliction is the first step
toward eliminating it. And since no one acquires the truth by divine revela¬
tion, we must also respect those who explore theories that may turn out to be
incorrect. Moral criticism would seem to be in order only for those who would
enforce dogmas, ignore evidence, or shut down research, because they would
be protecting their reputations at the expense of victims of rapes that might
not have occurred if we understood the phenomenon better.

Current sensibilities, unfortunately, are very different. In modern intellec-
tuallife the overriding moral imperative in analyzing rape is to proclaim that
rape has nothing to do with sex. The mantra must be repeated whenever the
subject comes up. "Rape is an abuse of power and control in which the rapist
seeks to humiliate, shame, embarrass, degrade, and terrify the victim:' the
United Nations declared in 1993. «The primary objective is to exercise power
and control over another person."! This was echoed in a 2001 Boston Globe
op-ed piece that said, "Rape is not about sex; it is about violence and the use of
sex to exert power and control. ... Domestic violence and sexual assault are
manifestations of the same powerful social forces: sexism and the glorification
of violence.”82 When an iconoclastic columnist wrote a dissenting article on
rape and battering, a reader responded:

As a man who has been actively engaged for more than a decade as an
educator and a counselor to help men to stop their violence against
women, I find Cathy Young's Oct. 15 column disturbing and discourag¬
ing. She confuses issues by failing to acknowledge that men are social¬
ized in a patriarchal culture that still supports their violence against
women if they choose it. 83

So steeped in the prevailing ideology was this counselor that he didn't notice
that Young was arguing against the dogma he took as self-evidently true, not
"failing to acknowledge" it. And his wording-"men are socialized in a patri¬
archal culture"-reproduces a numbingly familiar slogan.

360 /Hot Buttons

The official theory of rape originated in an important 1975 book. Against
Our Will, by the gender feminist Susan Brownmiller. The book became an em¬
blem of a revolution in our handling of rape that is one of second-wave femi¬
nism's greatest accomplishments. Until the 1970s, rape was often treated by
the legal system and popular culture with scant attention to the interests of
women. Victims had to prove they resisted their attackers to within an inch of
their lives or else they were seen as having consented. Their style of dress was
seen as a mitigating factor, as if men couldn't control themselves when an at¬
tractive woman walked by. Also mitigating was the woman's sexual history, as
if choosing to have sex with one man on one occasion were the same as agree¬
ing to have sex with any man on any occasion. Standards of proof that were
not required for other violent crimes, such as eyewitness corroboration, were
imposed on charges of rape. Women's consent was often treated lightly in the
popular media. It was not uncommon in movies for a reluctant woman to be
handled roughly by a man and then melt into his arms. The suffering of rape
victims was treated lightly as well; I remember teenage girls, in the wake of the
sexual revolution in the early 1970s, joking to one another, «If a rape is in¬
evitable, you might as well lie back and enjoy it." Marital rape was not a crime,
date rape was not a concept, and rape during wartime was left out of the his¬
tory books. These affronts to humanity are gone or on the wane in Western
democracies, and feminism deserves credit for this moral advance.

But Brownmiller's theory went well beyond the moral principle that
women have a right not to be sexually assaulted. It said that rape had nothing
to do with an individual man's desire for sex but was a tactic by which the en¬
tire male gender oppressed the entire female gender. In her famous words:

Man's discovery that his genitalia could serve as a weapon to generate
fear must rank as one of the most important discoveries of prehistoric
times, along with the use of fire and the first crude stone axe. From
prehistoric times to the present, I believe,rape has played a critical func¬
tion ... it is nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimida¬
tion by which all men keep all women in a state of fear .84

This grew into the modern catechism: rape is not about sex, our culture so¬
cializes men to rape, it glorifies violence against women. The analysis comes
right out of the gender-feminist theory of human nature: people are blank
slates (who must be trained or socialized to want things); the only significant
human motive is power (so sexual desire is irrelevant); and all motives and in¬
terests must be located in groups (such as the male sex and the female sex)
rather than in individual people.

The Brownmiller theory is appealing even to people who are not gender

Gender /361

feminists because of the doctrine of the Noble Savage. Since the 1960s most
educated people have come to believe that sex should be thought of as natural,
not shameful or dirty. Sex is good because sex is natural and natural things are
good. But rape is bad; therefore, rape is not about sex. The motive to rape must
come from social institutions, not from anything in human nature.

The violence-not-sex slogan is right about two things. Both parts are ab¬
solutely true for the victim: a woman who is raped experiences it as a violent
assault, not as a sexual act. And the part about violence is true for the perpe¬
trator by definition: if there is no violence or coercion, we do not call it rape.
But the fact that rape has something to do with violence does not mean it has
nothing to do with sex, any more than the fact that armed robbery has some¬
thing to do with violence means it has nothing to do with greed. Evil men
may use violence to get sex, just as they use violence to get other things they
want.

I believe that the rape-is-not-about-sex doctrine will go down in history
as an example of extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of
crowds. It is preposterous on the face of it, does not deserve its sanctity, is
contradicted by a mass of evidence, and is getting in the way of the only
morally relevant goal surrounding rape, the effort to stamp it out.

Think about it. First obvious fact: Men often want to have sex with
women who don't want to have sex with them. They use every tactic that one
human being uses to affect the behavior of another: wooing, seducing, flatter¬
ing, deceiving, sulking, and paying. Second obvious fact: Some men use vio¬
lence to get what they want, indifferent to the suffering they cause. Men have
been known to kidnap children for ransom (sometimes sending their parents
an ear or finger to show they mean business), blind the victim of a mugging
so the victim can't identify them in court, shoot out the kneecaps of an asso¬
ciate as punishment for ratting to the police or invading their territory, and
kill a stranger for his brand-name athletic footwear. It would be an extraordi¬
nary fact, contradicting everything else we know about people, if some men
didn't use violence to get sex.

Let’s also apply common sense to the doctrine that men rape to further
the interests of their gender. A rapist always risks injury at the hands of the
woman defending herself. In a traditional society, he risks torture, mutilation,
and death at the hands of her relatives. In a modern society, he risks a long
prison term. Are rapists really assuming these risks as an altruistic sacrifice to
benefit the billions of strangers that make up the male gender? The idea be¬
comes even less credible when we remember that rapists tend to be losers and
nobodies, while presumably the main beneficiaries of the patriarchy are the
rich and powerful. Men do sacrifice themselves for the greater good in
wartime, of course, but they are either conscripted against their will or prom¬
ised public adulation when their exploits are made public. But rapists usually

362/Hot Buttons

commit their acts in private and try to keep them secret. And in most times
and places, a man who rapes a woman in his community is treated as scum..
The idea that all men are engaged in brutal warfare against all women clashes
with the elementary fact that men have mothers, daughters, sisters, and wives,
whom they care for more than they care for most other men. To put the same
point in biological terms, every person's genes are carried in the bodies of
other people, half of whom are of the opposite sex.

Yes, we must deplore the sometimes casual treatment of women's auton¬
omy in popular culture. But can anyone believe that our culture literally
"teaches men to rape" or "glorifies the rapist"? Even the callous treatment of
rape victims in the judicial system of yesteryear has a simpler explanation than
that all men benefit by rape. Until recently jurors in rape cases were given a
warning from the seventeenth-century jurist Lord Matthew Hale that they
should evaluate a woman's testimony with caution, because a rape charge is
"easily made and difficult to defend against, even if the accused is innocent'?"
The principle is consistent with the presumption of innocence built into our
judicial system and with its preference to let ten guilty people go free rather
than jail one innocent. Even so, let's suppose that the men who applied this
policy to rape did tilt it toward their own collective interests. Let's suppose that
they leaned on the scales of justice to minimize their own chances of ever
being falsely accused of rape (or accused under ambiguous circumstances)
and that they placed insufficient value on the injustice endured by women
who would not see their assailants put behind bars. That would indeed be un¬
just, but it is still not the same thing as encouraging rape as a conscious tactic
to keep women down. If that were men's tactic, why 'Would they have made
rape a crime in the first place?

As for the morality of believing the not-sex theory, there is none. If we
have to acknowledge that sexuality can be a source of conflict and not just
wholesome mutual pleasure, we will have rediscovered a truth that observers
ofthe human condition have noted throughout history. And if a man rapes for
sex, that does not mean that he "just can’t help it" or that we have to excuse
him, any more than we have to excuse the man who shoots the owner of a
liquor store to raid the cash register or who bashes a driver over the head to
steal his BMW. The great contribution of feminism to the morality of rape is
to put issues of consent and coercion at center stage. The ultimate motives of
the rapist are irrelevant.

Finally, think about the humanity of the picture that the gender-feminist
theory has painted. As the equity feminist Wendy McElroy points out, the the¬
ory holds that "even the most loving and gentle husband, father, and son is a
beneficiary of the rape of women they love. No ideology that makes such vi¬
cious accusations against men as a class can heal any wounds. It can only pro¬
voke hostility in return:'86

Gender /363

BROWNMILLER ASKED A revealing rhetorical question:

Does one need scientific methodology in order to conclude that the
anti-female propaganda that permeates our nation's cultural output
promotes a climate in which acts of sexual hostility directed against
women are not only tolerated but ideologically encouraged?

McElroy responded: «The answer is a clear and simple (yes. 1 One needs scien¬
tific methodology to verify any empirical claim." And she called attention to
the consequences of Brownmiller's attitude: «One of the casualties of the new
dogma on rape has been research. It is no longer (sexually correct’ to conduct
studies on the causes ofrape, because-as any right-thinking person knows-
there is only one cause: patriarchy. Decades ago, during the heyday of liberal
feminism and sexual curiosity, the approach to research was more sophisti-
cated."87 McElroy's suspicions are borne out by a survey of published «studies"
of rape that found that fewer than one in ten tested hypotheses or used scien¬
tific methods."

Scientific research on rape and its connections to human nature was
thrown into the spotlight in 2000 with the publication ofA Natural History of
Rape. Thornhill and Palmer began with a basic observation: a rape can result
in a conception, which could propagate the genes of the rapist, including any
genes that had made him likely to rape. Therefore, a male psychology that in¬
cluded a capacity to rape would not have been selected against, and could have
been selected for. Thornhill and Palmer argued that rape is unlikely to be a typ¬
icalmating strategy because of the risk of inj ury at the hands of the victim and
her relatives and the risk of ostracism from the community. But it could be an
opportunistic tactic, becoming more likely when the man is unable to win the
consent of women, alienated from a community (and thus undeterred by os¬
tracism), and safe from detection and punishment (such as in wartime or
pogroms). Thornhill and Palmer then outlined two theories. Opportunistic
rape could be a Darwinian adaptation that was specifically selected for, as in
certain insects that have an appendage with no function other than restraining
a female during forced copulation. Or rape could be a by-product of two other
features of the male mind: a desire for sex and a capacity to engage in oppor¬
tunistic violence in pursuit of a goal. The two authors disagreed on which hy¬
pothesis was better supported by the data, and they left that issue unresolved.

No honest reader could conclude that the authors think rape is «natural"
in the vernacular sense of being welcome or unavoidable. The first words of
the book are, “As scientists who would like to see rape eradicated from human
life which are certainly not the words of people who think it is in¬
evitable. Thornhill and Palmer discuss the environmental circumstances that

364/Hot Buttons

affect the likelihood of rape, and they offer suggestions on how to reduce it.
The idea that most men have the capacity to rape works, if anything, in the
interests of women) because it calls for vigilance against acquaintance rape)
marital rape) and rape during societal breakdowns. Indeed) the analysis jibes
with Brownmiller's own data that ordinary men, including «nice" American
boys in Vietnam, may rape in wartime. For that matter, Thornhill and
Palmer's hypothesis that rape is on a continuum with the rest of male sexual-
itymakes them strange allies with the most radical gender feminists, such as
Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin, who said that "seduction is
often difficult to distinguish from rape. In seduction, the rapist often bothers
to buy a bottle ofwine."?

Most important, the book focuses in equal part on the pain of the victims.
(Its draft title was Why Men Rape, Why Women Suffer.) Thornhill and Palmer
explain in Darwinian terms why females throughout the animal kingdom re¬
sist being forced into sex, and argue that the agony that rape victims feel is
deeply rooted in women's nature. Rape subverts female choice, the core of the
ubiquitous mechanism of sexual selection. By choosing the male and the cir¬
cumstances for sex, a female can maximize the chances that her offspring will
be fathered by a male with good genes) a willingness and ability to share the re¬
sponsibility of rearing the offspring, or both. As John Tooby and Leda Cos-
rnides have put it) this ultimate (evolutionary) calculus explains why women
evolved “to exert control over their own sexuality, over the terms of.their rela¬
tionships, and over the choice of which men are to be the fathers of their chil¬
dren," They resist being raped, and they suffer when their resistance fails,
because «control over their sexual choices and relationships was wrested from
them,"?"

Thornhill and Palmer's theory reinforces many points of an equity-
feminist analysis. It predicts that from the woman's point of view, rape and
consensual sex are completely different. It affirms that women's repugnance
toward rape is not a symptom of neurotic repression, nor is it a social con¬
struct that could easily be the reverse in a different culture. It predicts that the
suffering caused by rape is deeper than the suffering caused by other physical
traumas or body violations. That justifies our working harder to prevent rape,
and punishing the perpetrators more severely, than we do for other kinds of
assault. Compare this analysis with the dubious claim by two gender feminists
that an aversion to rape has to be pounded into women by every social influ¬
ence they can think of:

Female fear... [results] not only from women's personal back¬
grounds but from what women as a group have imbibed from history,

religion) culture) social institutions, and everyday social interactions.

Learned early in life, female fear is continually reinforced by such

Gender / 365

social institutions as the school, the church, the law, and the press.
Much is also learned from parents, siblings, teachers, and friends."

But despite the congeniality of their analysis to women's interests, Thorn¬
hill and Palmer had broken a taboo, and the response was familiar: there were
demonstrations, disruptions of lectures, and invective that would curdle your
hair, as the popular malaprop has it. "Latest nauseating scientific theory" was
a typical reaction, and radical scientists applied their usual standards of accu¬
racy to denounce it. Hilary Rose, discussing a presentation of the theory by an¬
other biologist, wrote, "The sociobiologist David Barash's appeal in defense of
his misogynist claims that men are naturally predisposed to rape, 'If Nature is
sexist don't blame her sons: can no longer plug into the old deference to sci¬
ence as the view from nowhere."? Barash, of course, had said no such thing; he
had referred to rapists as criminals who should be punished. The science
writer Margaret Wertheim began her review of Thornhill and Palmer's book
by calling attention to a recent epidemic of rape in South Africa." Pitting the
theory that rape is "a byproduct of social conditioning and chaos" against the
theory that rape has evolutionary and genetic origins, she sarcastically wrote
that if the latter were true, "South Africa must be a hothouse for such genes."
Two slurs for the price of one: the statement puts Thornhill and Palmer on the
simplistic side of a false dichotomy (in fact, they devote many pages to the so¬
cial conditions fostering rape) and slips in the innuendo that their theory is
racist, too. The psychologist Geoffrey Miller, in his own mixed review of the
book, diagnosed the popular reaction:

The Natural History of Rapehas already suffered the worst possible fate
for a popular science book. Like The Descent of Man and TheBellCurve,
it has become an ideological touchstone. People who wish to demon¬
strate their sympathy for rape victims and women in general have al¬
ready learned that they must dismiss this book as sexist, reactionary
pseudo-science. News stories that treat the book as a symptom of chau¬
vinist cultural decay have greatly outnumbered reviews that assess it as
science. Viewed sociologically, turning books into ideological touch¬
stones can be useful. People can efficiently sort themselves out into like-
minded cliques without bothering to read or think. However, there can
be more to human discourse than ideological self-advertisement."

It's unfortunate that Thornhill and Palmer themselves set up a dichotomy
between the theory that rape is an adaptation (a specifically selected sexual
strategy) and the theory that it is a by-product (a consequence of using vio¬
lence in general), because it diverted attention from the more basic claim that
rape has something to do with sex. I think their dichotomy is drawn too

366/Hot Buttons

sharply. Male sexuality may have evolved in a world in which women were
more discriminating than men about partners and occasions for sex. That
would have led men to treat female reluctance as an obstacle to be overcome.
(Another way to put it is that one can imagine a species in which the male
could become sexually interested only if he detected reciprocal signs of inter¬
est on the part of the female, but that humans do not appear to be such a
species.) How the woman's reluctance is overcome depends on the rest of the
man's psychology and on his assessment of the circumstances. His usual tac¬
tics may include being kind, persuading the woman of his good intentions,
and offering the proverbial bottle of wine, but may become increasingly coer-
cive-ascertain risk factors are multiplied in: the man is a psychopath (hence in¬
sensitive to the suffering of others), an outcast (hence immune to ostracism),
a loser (with no other means to get sex), or a soldier or ethnic rioter who con¬
siders an enemy subhuman and thinks he can get away with it. Certainly most
men in ordinary circumstances do not harbor a desire to rape. According to
surveys, violent rape is unusual in pornography and sexual fantasies, and ac¬
cording to laboratory studies of men's sexual arousal, depictions of actual vio¬
lence toward a woman or signs of her pain and humiliation are a turnoff."

What about the more basic question of whether the motives of rapists in¬
clude sex?The gender-feminist argument that they do not points to the rapists
who target older, infertile women, those who suffer from sexual dysfunction
during the rape, those who coerce nonreproductive sexual acts, and those who
use a condom. The argument is unconvincing for two reasons. First, these ex¬
amples make up a minority of rapes, so the argument could be turned around
to show that most rapes do have a sexual motive. And all these phenomena
occur with consensual sex, too, so the argument leads to the absurdity that sex
itself has nothing to do with sex. And date rape is a particularly problematic
case for the not-sex theory. Most people agree that women have the right to say
no at any point during sexual activity, and that if the man persists he is a
rapist-but should we also believe that his motive has instantaneously
changed from wanting sex to oppressing women?

On the other side there, is an impressive body of evidence (reviewed more
thoroughly by the legal scholar Owen Jones than by Thornhill and Palmer)
that the motives for rape overlap with the motives for sex.'"

• Coerced copulation is widespread among species in the animal kingdom,
suggesting that it is not selected against and may sometimes be selected
for. It is found in many species of insects, birds, and mammals, including
our relatives the orangutans, gorillas, and chimpanzees.

• Rape is found in all human societies.

• Rapists generally apply as much force as is needed to coerce the victim
into sex. They rarely inflict a serious or fatal injury, which would preclude

Gender /367

conception and birth. Only 4 percent of rape victims sustain serious in¬
juries, and fewer than one in fivehundred is murdered.

• Victims of rape are mostly in the peak reproductive years for women, be¬
tween thirteen and thirty-five, with a mean in most data sets of twenty-
four. Though many rape victims are classified as children (under the age
of sixteen), most of these are adolescents, with a median age of fourteen.
The age distribution is very different from that of victims of other violent
crimes, and is the opposite of what would happen if rape victims were
picked for their physical vulnerability or by their likelihood of holding po¬
sitions of power.

• Victims of rape are more traumatized when the rape can result in a con¬
ception. It is most psychologically painful for women in their fertile years,
and for victims of forced intercourse as opposed to other forms of rape.

• Rapists are not demographically representative of the male gender. They
are overwhelmingly young men, the age of the most intense sexual com¬
petitiveness. The young males who allegedly have been "socialized" to rape
mysteriously lose that socialization as they get older.

• Though most rapes do not result in conception, many do. About 5 percent
of rape victims of reproductive age become pregnant, resulting in more
than 32,000 rape-related pregnancies in the United States each year. (That
is why abortion in the case of rape is a significant issue.) The proportion
would have been even higher in prehistory, when women did not use
long-term contraception." Brownmiller wrote that biological theories of
rape are "fanciful" because "in terms of reproductive strategy, the hit or
miss ejaculations of a single-strike rapist are a form of Russian roulette
compared to ongoing consensual mating."98 But ongoing consensual mat¬
ing is not an option for every male, and dispositions that resulted in hit-
or-miss sex could be evolutionarily more successful than dispositions that
resulted in no sex at all. Natural selection can operate effectively with
small reproductive advantages, as little as 1 percent.

THE payoff for a reality-based understanding of rape is the hope of reduc¬
ing or eliminating it. Given the theories on the table, the possible sites for
levers of influence include violence, sexist attitudes, and sexual desire.

Everyone agrees that rape is a crime of violence. Probably the biggest am¬
plifier of rape is lawlessness. The rape and abduction of women is often a goal
of raiding in non-state societies, and rape is common in wars between states
and riots between ethnic groups. In peacetime, the rates of rape tend to track
rates of other violent crime. In the United States, for example, the rate of
forcible rape went up in the 1960s and down in the 1990s, together with the
rates of other violent crimes." Gender feminists blame violence against
women on civilization and social institutions, but this is exactly backwards.

368/Hot Buttons

Violence against women flourishes in societies that are outside the reach of
civilization, and erupts whenever civilization breaks down.

Though I know of no quantitative studies, the targeting of sexist attitudes
does not seem to be a particularly promising avenue for reducing rape, though
of course it is desirable for other reasons. Countries with far more rigid gen¬
der roles than the United States, such as Japan, have far lower rates of rape, and
within the United States the sexist 1950s were far safer for women than the
more liberated 1970s and 1980s. If anything, the correlation might go in the
opposite direction. As women gain greater freedom of movement because
they are independent of men, they will more often find themselves in danger¬
ous situations.

What about measures that focus on the sexual components of rape?
Thornhill and Palmer suggested that teenage boys be forced to take a rape-
prevention course as a condition for obtaining a driver's license, and that
women should be reminded that dressing in a sexually attractive way may in¬
crease their risk of being raped. These untested prescriptions are an excellent
illustration of why scientists should stay out of the policy business, but they
don't deserve the outrage that followed. Mary Koss, described as an authority
on rape, said, "The thinking is absolutely unacceptable in a democratic soci¬
ety." (Note the psychology of taboo-not only is their suggestion wrong, but
merely thinking it is "absolutely unacceptable.") Koss continues, "Because rape
is a gendered crime, such recommendations harm equality. They infringe
more on women's liberties than men's:'IOO

One can understand the repugnance at any suggestion that an attractively
dressed woman excites an irresistible impulse to rape, or that culpability in any
crime should be shifted from the perpetrator to the victim. But Thornhill and
Palmer said neither of those things. They were offering a recommendation
based on prudence, not an assignment of blame based on justice. Of course
women have a right to dress in any way they please, but the issue is not what
women have the right to do in a perfect world but how they can maximize
their safety in this world. The suggestion that women in dangerous situations
be mindful of reactions they may be eliciting or signals they may inadvertently
be sending is just common sense, and it’s hard to believe any grownup would
think otherwise-unless she has been indoctrinated by the standard rape-
prevention programs that tell women that "sexual assault is not an act of sex¬
ual gratification" and that "appearance and attractiveness are not relevant."?!
Equity feminists have called attention to the irresponsibility of such advice, in
terms far harsher than anything by Thornhill and Palmer. Paglia, for example,
wrote:

For a decade, feminists have drilled their disciples to say, "Rape is

a crime of violence but not sex:' This sugar-coated Shirley Temple

Gender/369

nonsense has exposed young women to disaster. Misled by feminism,
they do not expect rape from the nice boys from good homes who sit
next to them in class.

These girls say, "Well. I should be able to get drunk at a fraternity
party and go upstairs to a guy's room without anything happening." And
I say,"Oh, really? And when you drive your car to NewYorkCity, do you
leave your keys on the hood?" My point is that if your car is stolen after
you do something like that, yes, the police should pursue the thief and
he should be punished. But at the same time, the police-and I-have
the right to say to you, “You stupid idiot, what the hell were you think¬
ing?” 102

Similarly, McElroy points out the illogic of arguments like Koss's that women
should not be given practical advice that "infringes more on women's liberties
than men’s":

The fact that women are vulnerable to attack means we cannot have it
all. We cannot walk at night across an unlit campus or down aback alley,
without incurring real danger. These are things every woman should be
able to do, but "shoulds" belong in a utopian world. They belong in a
world where you drop your wallet in a crowd and have it returned, com¬
plete with credit cards and cash. A world in which unlocked Porsches are
parked in the inner city. And children can be left unattended in the park.

This is not the reality that confronts and confines us. 103

The flight from reality of the rape-is-not-sex doctrine warps not just ad¬
vice to women but policies for deterring rapists. Some prison systems put sex
offenders in group therapy and psychodrama sessions designed to uproot ex¬
periences of childhood abuse. The goal is to convince the offenders that ag¬
gression against women is a way of acting out anger at their mothers, fathers,
and society. (A sympathetic story in the Boston Globe concedes that «there is
no way to know what the success rate of [the] therapy is."jior Another program
reeducates batterers and rapists with "pro-feminist therapy" consisting of lec¬
tures on patriarchy, heterosexism, and the connections between domestic vio¬
lence and racial oppression. In an article entitled “The Patriarchy Made Me Do
It;’ the psychiatrist Sally Satel comments, «While it’s tempting to conclude that
perhaps pro-feminist (therapy 1 is just what a violent man deserves, the tragic
fact is that truly victimized women are put in even more danger when their
husbands undergo a worthless treatment.”?” Savvy offenders who learn to
mouth the right psychobabble or feminist slogans can be seen as successfully
treated, which can win them earlier release and the opportunity to prey on
women anew.

370 /Hot Buttons

In his thoughtful review, Jones explores how the legal issues surrounding
rape can be clarified by a more sophisticated understanding that does not rule
the sexual component out of bounds. One example is «chemical castration,”
voluntary injections of the drug Depo- Provera, which inhibits the release of
androgens and reduces the offender's sex drive. It is sometimes given to of¬
fenders who are morbidly obsessed with sex and compulsively commit crimes
such as rape, indecent exposure, and child abuse. Chemical castration can cut
recidivism rates dramatically-in one study, from 46 percent to 3 percent. Use
of the drug certainly raises serious constitutional issues about privacy and
punishment, which biology alone cannot decide. But the issues become
cloudier, not clearer, when commentators declare a priori that "castration will
not work because rape is not a crime about sex, but rather a crime about
power and violence."

Jones is not advocating chemical castration (and neither am 0 . He is ask¬
ing people to look at all the options for reducing rape and to evaluate them
carefully and with an open mind. Anyone who is incensed by the very idea of
mentioning rape and sex in the same breath should read the numbers again. If
a policy is rejected out of hand that can reduce rape by a factor of fifteen, then
many women will be raped who otherwise might not have been. People may
have to decide which they value more, an ideology that claims to advance the
interests of the female gender or what actually happens in the world to real
women.

DESPITE all THE steam coming out of people's ears in the modern debate on
the sexes,there are wide expanses ofcommon ground. No one wants to accept
sex discrimination or rape. No one wants to turn back the clock and empty the
universities and professions of women, even if that were possible. No reason¬
able person can deny that the advances in the freedom of women during the,
past century are an incalculable enrichment of the human condition.

All the more reason not to get sidetracked by emotionally charged but
morally irrelevant red herrings. The sciences of human nature can strengthen
the interests of women by separating those herrings from the truly important
goals. Feminism as a movement for political and social equity is important, but
feminism as an academic clique committed to eccentric doctrines about hu¬
man nature is not. Eliminating discrimination against women is important,
but believing that women and men are born with indistinguishable minds is
not. Freedom of choice is important, but ensuring that women make up exactly
50 percent of all professions is not. And eliminating sexual assaults is impor¬
tant, but advancing the theory that rapists are doing their part in a vast male
conspiracy is not.

Gender / 371

Chapter 19

Children

"THE NATURE-NURTURE DEBATE is over:' So begins a recent article with a
title-"Three Laws of Behavior Genetics and What They Mean»-as auda¬
cious as its opening sentence.' The nature-nurture debate is, of course, far
from over when it comes to identifying the endowment shared by all human
beings and understanding how it allows us to learn, which is the main topic
of the preceding chapters. But when it comes to the question of what makes
people within the mainstream of a society different from one another-
whether they are smarter or duller, nicer or nastier, bolder or shyer-the
nature-nurture debate, as it has been played out for millennia, really is over,
or ought to be.

In announcing that the nature-nurture debate is over, the psychologist
Eric Turkheimer was not just using the traditional mule-trainer's technique of
getting his subjects' attention, namely whacking them over the head with a
two-by-four. He was summarizing a body of empirical results that are unusu¬
ally robust by the standards of psychology. They have been replicated in many
studies, several countries, and over four decades. As the samples grew (often to
many thousands), the tools were improved, and the objections were ad¬
dressed, the results, like the Star-Spangled Banner, were still there.

The three laws of behavioral genetics may be the most important discov¬
eries in the history of psychology. Yet most psychologists have not come to
grips with them, and most intellectuals do not understand them, even when
they have been explained in the cover stories of newsmagazines. It is not be¬
cause the laws are abstruse: each can be stated in a sentence, without mathe¬
matical paraphernalia. Rather, it is because the laws run roughshod over the
Blank Slate, and the Blank Slate is so entrenched that many intellectuals can¬
not comprehend an alternative to it, let alone argue about whether it is right or
wrong.

Here are the three laws:

372/Hot Buttons

• The First Law: All human behavioral traits are heritable.

• The Second Law: The effect of being raised in the same family is smaller
than the effect of the genes.

• The Third Law: A substantial portion of the variation in complex human
behavioral traits is not accounted for by the effects of genes or families.

The laws are about what make us what we are (compared with our com¬
patriots) and thus they are about the forces that impinge on us in childhood,
the stage of life in which it is thought that our intellects and personalities are
formed. "Just as the twig is bent, the tree's inclined;' wrote Alexander Pope.
"The child is father of the man;' wrote Wordsworth, echoing Milton's "The
childhood shows the man as morning shows the day." The Jesuits used to say,
"Give me the child for the first seven years, and I'll give you the man;' and the
motto was used as the tag line of the documentary film series by Michael
Apted that follows a cohort of British children every seven years (Seven Up,
Fourteen Up, and so on). In this chapter I will walk you through the laws and
explore what they mean for nature, nurture, and none of the above.

THE FIRST LAW: All human behavioral traits are heritable. Let's begin at the
beginning. What is a "behavioral trait"? In many studies it is a stable property
of a person that can be measured by standardized psychological tests. Intelli¬
gence tests ask people to recite a string of digits backwards, define words like
reluctant and remorse, identify what an egg and a seed have in common, as¬
semble four triangles into a square, and extrapolate sequences of geometric
patterns. Personality tests ask people to agree or disagree with statements like
"Often I cross the street in order not to meet someone I know;'“I do not blame
a person for taking advantage of someone who lays himself open to it,” "Before
I do something I try to consider how my friends will react to it," and "People say
insulting and vulgar things about me." It sounds dodgy, but the tests have been
amply validated: they give pretty much the same result each time a person is
tested, and they statistically predict what they ought to predict reasonably well.
IQ tests predict performance in school 'and on the job, and personality profiles
correlate with other people's judgments of the person and with life outcomes
such as psychiatric diagnoses, marriage stability, and brushes with the law. 2

In other studies behavior is recorded more directly. Graduate students
hang out in a schoolyard with a stopwatch and clipboard observing what the
children do. Pupils are rated for aggressivenessby several teachers, and the rat¬
ings are averaged. People report how much television they watch or how many
cigarettes they smoke. Researchers tally cut-and-dried outcomes such as high
school graduation rates, criminal convictions, or divorces.

Once the measurements are made, the variance of the sample may be

Children / 373

calculated: the average squared deviation of each person's score from the
group mean. The variance is a number that captures the degree to which the
members of a group differ from one another. For example, the variance in
weight in a sample of Labrador retrievers will be smaller than the variance in
weight in a sample that contains dogs of different breeds. Variance can be
carved into pieces. It is mathematically meaningful to say that a certain per¬
centage of the variance in a group overlaps with one factor (perhaps, though
not necessarily, its cause), another percentage overlaps with a second factor,
and so on, the percentages adding up to 100. The degree of overlap may be
measured as a correlation coefficient, a number between -1 and +1 that cap¬
tures the degree to which people who are high on one measurement are also
high on another measurement. It is used in behavioral genetic research as an
estimate of the proportion ofvariance accounted for by some factor. 3

Heritability is the proportion ofvariance in a trait that correlates with ge¬
netic differences. It can be measured in several ways." The simplest is to take
the correlation between identical twins who were separated at birth and reared
apart. They share all their genes.and none of their environment (relative to the
variation among environments in the sample), so any correlation between
them must be an effect of their genes. Alternatively, one can compare identical
twins reared together, who share all their genes and most of their environ¬
ment' with fraternal twins reared together, who share half their genes and
most of their environment (to be exact, they share half of the genes that vary
among the people within the sample-obviously they share all the genes that
are universal across the human species). If the correlation is higher for pairs of
identical twins, it presumably reflects an effect of the extra genes they have in
common. The bigger the difference between the two correlations, the higher
the heritability estimate. Yet another technique is to compare biological sib¬
lings, who share half their genes and most of their environment, with adoptive
siblings, who share none of their genes (among those that vary) and most of
their environment.

The results come out roughly the same no matter what is measured or how
it is measured. Identical twins reared apart are highly similar; identical twins
reared together are more similar than fraternal twins reared together; biologi¬
cal siblings are far more similar than adoptive siblings," All this translates into
substantial heritability values, generally between .25 and .75. A conventional
summary is that about half of the variation in intelligence, personality, and life
outcomes is heritable-a correlate or an indirect product of the genes. It's hard
to be much more precise than that, because heritability values vary within this
range for a number of reasons." One is whether measurement error (random
noise) is included in the total variance to be explained or is estimated and
pulled out of the equation. Another is whether «//the effects of the genes are
being estimated or only the additive effects: the ones that exert the same influ-

374/Hot Buttons

ence regardless ofthe person's other genes (in other words, the genes for traits
that breed true). A third is how much variation there was in the sample to begin
with: samples with homogeneous environments give large heritability esti¬
mates, those with varied environments give smaller ones. A fourth is when in
the person's lifetime a trait is measured. The heritability of intelligence, for ex¬
ample, increases over the lifespan, and can be as high as .Blate in life." Forget “As
the twig is bent"; think"Omigod, I'm turning into my parents!"

"All traits are heritable" is a bit of an exaggeration, but not by much."
Concrete behavioral traits that patently depend on content provided by the
home or culture are, of course, not heritable at all: which language you speak,
which religion you worship in, which political party you belong to. But be¬
havioral traits that reflect the underlying talents and temperaments are herita¬
ble: how proficient with language you are, how religious, how liberal or
conservative. General intelligence is heritable, and so are the five major ways
in which personality can vary (summarized by the acronym OCEAN): open¬
ness to experience, conscientiousness, extroversion-introversion, antagonism-
agreeableness, and neuroticism. And traits that are surprisingly specific turn
out to be heritable, too, such as dependence on nicotine or alcohol, number of
hours of television watched, and likelihood of divorcing. Finally there are the
Mallifert brothers in Chas Addams's patent office and their real-world coun¬
terparts: the identical twins separated at birth who both grew up to be captains
of their volunteer fire departments, who both twirled their necklaces when an¬
swering questions, or who both told the researcher picking them up at the air¬
port (separately) that a wheel bearing in his car needed to be replaced.

I once watched an interview in which Marlon Brando was asked about the
childhood influences that made him an actor. He replied that identical twins
separated at birth may both use the same hair tonic, smoke the same brand of
cigarettes, vacation on the same beach, and so on. The interviewer, Connie
Chung, pretended to snore as if she were sitting through a boring lecture, not
realizing that he was answering her question-or, more accurately, explaining
why he couldn't answer it. As long as the heritability of talents and tastes is not
zero, none of us has any way of knowing whether a trait has been influenced
by our genes, our childhood experiences, both, or neither. Chung is not alone
in her failure to understand this point. The First Faw implies that any study
that measures something in parents and something in their biological children
and then draws conclusions about the effects of parenting is worthless, be¬
cause the correlations may simply reflect their shared genes (aggressive par¬
ents may breed aggressive children, talkative parents talkative children). But
these expensive studies continue to be done and continue to be translated into
parenting advice as if the heritability of all traits were zero. Perhaps Brando
should be asked to serve on grant review panels.

Behavioral genetics does have its critics, who have tried to find alternative

Children / 375

interpretations for the First Law. Perhaps children separated at birth are delib¬
erately placed in similar adoptive families. Perhaps they have contact with each
other during their separation. Perhaps parents expect identical twins to be
more alike and so treat them more alike. Twins share a womb, not just their
genes, and 'identical twins sometimes share a chorion (the membrane sur¬
rounding the fetus) and a placenta as welL Perhaps it is their shared prenatal
experience, not their shared genes, that makes them more alike.

These possibilities have been tested, and though in some cases they may
knock down a heritability estimate by a fewpoints, they cannot reduce it by
much." The properties of adoptive parents and homes have been measured
(their education, socioeconomic status, personalities, and so on), and they are
not homogeneous enough to force identical twins into the same personalities
and temperaments.'? Identical twins are not earmarked for homes that both
encourage twirling necklaces or sneezing in elevators. More important, the
homes of identical twins who were separated at birth are no more similar than
the homes of fraternal twins who were separated at birth, yet the identical
twins are far more similar. 11 And most important of all, differences in home
environments do not produce differences in grown children's intelligence and
personality anyway (as we shall see in examining the Second Law), so the ar¬
gument is moot.

As for contact between separated twins, it is unlikely that an occasional
encounter between two people could revamp their personality and intelli¬
gence, but in any case the amount of contact turns out to have no correlation
with the twins' degree of similarity. 12 What about the expectations of parents,
friends, and peers? A neat test is provided by identical twins who are mistak¬
enly thought to be fraternal until a genetic test shows otherwise. If it is expec¬
tations that make identical twins alike, these twins should not be alike; if it is
the genes, they should be. In fact the twins are as alike as when the parents
know they are identicaLi3 And direct measures of how similarly twins are
treated by their parents do not correlate with measures of how similar they are
in intelligence or personality.'! Finally, sharing a placenta can make identical
twins more different, not just more similar (since one twin can crowd out the
other), which is why studies have shown little or no consistent effect of shar¬
ing a placenta." But even if it were to make them more similar, the inflation of
heritability would be modest. As the behavioral geneticist Matt McGue noted
of a recent mathematical model that tried to use prenatal effects to push down
heritability estimates as much as possible, "That the IQ debate now centers on
whether IQ is 500/0 or 70% heritable is a remarkable indication of how the
nature-nurture debate has shifted over the past two decades."16 In any case,
studies comparing adoptees with biological siblings don’t look at twins at all,
and they come to the same conclusions as the twin studies, so no peculiarity of
twinhood is likely to overturn the First Law.

376/Hot Buttons

Behavioral genetic methods do have three built-in limitations. First, stud¬
ies of twins, siblings, and adoptees can help explain what makes people differ¬
ent, but they cannot explain what people have in common, that is, universal
human nature. To say that the heritability of intelligence is .5, for example,
does not imply that half of a person's intelligence is inherited (whatever that
would mean); it implies only that half of the variation among people is inher¬
ited. Behavioral genetic studies of pathological conditions, such as those dis¬
cussed in Chapters 3 and 4, cmtshed light on universal human nature, but they
are not relevant to the topics of this chapter.

Second, behavioral genetic methods address variation within the group of
people being examined, not variation between groups of people. If the twins or
, adoptees in a sample are all middle-class American whites, a heritability esti¬
mate can tell us about why middle-class American whites differ from other
middle-class American whites, but not why the middle class differs from the
lower or upper class, why Americans differ, from non-Americans, or why
whites differ from Asians or blacks.

Third, behavioral genetic methods can show only that traits correlate with
genes, not that they are directly caused by them. The methods cannot distin¬
guish traits that are relatively direct products of the genes-the result of genes
that affect the wiring or metabolism of the brain-from traits that are highly
indirect products, say,the result of having genes for a certain physical appear¬
ance. We know that tall men on average are promoted in their jobs more rap¬
idly than short men, and that attractive people on average are more assertive
than unattractive ones." (In one experiment, subjects undergoing a fake in¬
terview had to cool their heels when the interviewer was called out of the room
by a staged interruption. The plain-looking subjects waited nine minutes be¬
fore complaining; the attractive ones waited three minutes and twenty sec¬
onds.)" Presumably people defer to tall and good-looking people, and that
makes them more successful and entitled. Height and looks are obviously her¬
itable, so if we didn't know about the effects oflooks, we might think that these
people's success comes directly from genes for ambition and assertiveness in¬
stead of coming indirectly from genes for long legs or a cute nose. The moral
is that heritability always has to be interpreted in the light of all the evidence;
it does not wear its meaning on its sleeve. That having been said, we know that
the heritability of personality cannot, in fact, be reduced to genes for appear¬
ance. The effects oflooks on personality are small and limited; blond jokes
notwithstanding, not all attractive women are vain and entitled. The heritabil¬
ity of personality traits, in contrast, is large and pervasive, too large to be ex¬
plained away as a by-product of lOOks. 19 And as we saw in Chapter 3,
personality traits can in some cases be tied to actual genes with products in the
nervous system. With the completion of the Human Genome Project, it is
likely that geneticists soon will be discovering more of those linkages.

Children / 377

The First Law is a pain in the neck for radical scientists, who have tried un¬
successfully to discredit it. In 1974, Leon Kamin wrote that "there exist no data
which should lead a prudent man to accept the hypothesis that IQ test scores
are in any degree heritable:' a conclusion he reiterated with Lewontin and Rose
a decade later.i" Even in the 1970s the argument was tortuous, but by the 1980s
, it was desperate and today it is a historical curiosity." As usual, the attacks
have not always come in dispassionate scholarly analyses. Thomas Bouchard,
who directed the first large-scale study of twins reared apart, is one of the pio¬
neers of the study of the genetics of personality. Campus activists at the Uni¬
versity ofMinnesota distributed handouts calling him a racist and linking him
to "German fascism," spray-painted slogans calling him a Nazi, and demanded
that he be fired. The psychologist Barry Mehler accused him of "rehabilitat¬
ing" the work of Josef Mengele, the doctor who tormented twins in the Nazi
death camps under the guise ofresearch. As usual, the charges were unfair not
justintellectually but personally: far from being a fascist, Bouchard was a par¬
ticipant in the Berkeley Free Speech Movement of the 1960s, was brieflyjailed
for his activism, and says he would do it again to day .22

These attacks are transparently political and easy to discount. More perni¬
cious is the way that the First Law is commonly interpreted: "So you're saying
it's all in the genes:' or, more angrily, "Genetic determinism!" I have already
commented on this odd reflex in modern intellectual life: when it comes to
genes, people suddenly lose their ability to distinguish SO percent from 100
percent, "some" from "all:' "affects" from "determines." The diagnosis for this
intellectual crippling is clear: if the effects of the genes must, on theological
grounds, be zero, then all nonzero values are equivalently heretical.

But the worst fallout from the Blank Slate is not that people misunder¬
stand the effects of the genes. It is that they misunderstand the effects of the
environment.

the second law: The effect of being raised in the samefamily is smaller than
the effect of the genes. By now you appreciate that our genes playarole in mak¬
ing us different from our neighbors, and that our environments play an
equally important role. At this point everyone draws the same conclusion. We
are shaped both by our genes and by our family upbringing: how our parents
treated us and what kind of home we grew up in.

Not so fast. Behavioral genetics allows us to distinguish two very different
ways in which our environments might affect us. 23 The shared environment is
what impinges on us and our siblings alike: our parents, our home life, and our
neighborhood (as compared with other parents and neighborhoods in the
sample). The nonshared or unique environment is everything else: anything
that impinges on one sibling but not another, including parental favoritism
(Mom always liked you best), the presence of the other siblings, unique expe-

378 / Hot Buttons

lienees like falling off a bicycle or being infected by a virus, and for that mat¬
ter anything that happens to us over the course of our lives that does not nec¬
essarily happen to our siblings.

The effects of the shared environment can be measured in twin studies by
subtracting the heritability value from the correlation between the identical
twins. The rationale is that identical twins are alike (measured by the correla¬
tion) because of their shared genes (measured by the heritability) and their
shared environment, so the effects of the shared environment can be estimated
by subtracting the heritability from the correlation. Alternatively, the effects
can be estimated in adoption studies simply by looking at the correlation be¬
tween two adoptive siblings: they do not share genes, so any similarities (rela¬
tive to the sample) must come from the experiences they shared growing up in
the same home. A third technique is to compare the correlation between sib¬
lings reared together (who share genes and a home environment) with the cor¬
relation between siblings reared apart (who share only genes).

The effects of the tm/gt/eenvironment can be measured by subtracting the
correlation between identical twins (who share genes and an environment)
from 1 (which is the sum of the effects of the genes, the shared environment,
and the unique environment). By the .same reasoning, it can be measured in
adoption studies by subtracting the heritability estimate and the shared-
environment estimate from l.In practice all these calculations are more com¬
plicated, because they may try to account for nonadditive effects, where the
whole is not the sum of the parts, and for noise in the measurements. But you
now have the basic logic behind them.

So what do we find? The effects of shared environment are small (less than
10 percent of the variance), often not statistically significant, often not repli¬
cated in other studies, and often a big fat zero." Turkheimer was cautious in
saying that the effects are smaller than those of the genes. Many behavioral ge¬
neticists go farther and say that they are negligible, particularly in adulthood.
(IQ is affected by the shared environment in childhood, but over the years the
effect peters out to nothing.)

Where do these, conclusions come from? The actual findings are easy to
understand. First, adult siblings are equally similar whether they grew up to¬
gether or apart. Second, adoptive siblings are no more similar than two people
plucked off the street at random. And third, identical twins are no more simi¬
lar than one would expect from the effects of their shared genes. As with the
First Law, the sheer consistency of the outcome across three completely dif¬
ferent methods (comparisons'of identical with fraternal twins, of siblings
raised together with siblings raised apart, of adoptive siblings with biological
siblings) emboldens one to conclude that the pattern is real. Whatever experi¬
ences siblings share by growing up in the same home makes little or no differ¬
ence in the kind of people they turn out to be.

Children / 379

An important proviso: Differences among homes don't matter within the
samples of homes netted by these studies, which tend to be more middle-class
than the population as a whole. But differences between those samples and
other kinds of homes could matter. The studies exclude cases of criminal
neglect, physical and sexual abuse, and abandonment in a bleak orphanage, so
they do not show that extreme cases fail to leave scars. Nor can they say any¬
thing about the differences between cultures-about what makes a child a
middle-class American as opposed to a Yanornamo warrior or a Tibetan monk
or even a member of an urban street gang. In general, if a sample comes from
a restricted range of homes, it may underestimate effects of homes across a
wider ranged"

Despite these caveats, the Second Law is by no means trivial. The "middle
class" (which includes most adoptive parents) can embrace a wide range of
lifestyles, from fundamentalist Christians in the rural Midwest to Jewish doc¬
tors in Manhattan, with very different home environments and childrearing
philosophies. Behavioral geneticists have found that their samples ofparents in
fact span a full range of personality types. And even if adoptive parents are un¬
representative in some other way, the Second Law would survive because it
emerges from large studies oftwins as well." Though samples of adoptive par¬
ents span a narrower ( and higher) range of IQs than the population at large,
that cannot explain why the IQs of their adult children are uncorrelated, be¬
cause they were correlated when the children were young." Before exploring
the revolutionary implications of these discoveries, let's turn to the Third Law.

the third law: A substcinticilportion of the variation in complexhuman be¬
havioral traits is not accounted for by the effects of genes orfamilies. This follows
directly from the First Law, assuming that heritabilities are less than one, and
the Second Law. If we carve up the variation among people into the effects of
the genes, the shared environment, and the unique environment, and if the ef¬
fects of the genes are greater than zero and less than one, and if the effects of
the shared environment hover around zero, then the effects of the unique en¬
vironment must be greater than zero. In fact, they are around 50 percent, de¬
pending as always on what is being measured and exactly how it is estimated.
Concretely, this means that identical twins reared together (who share both
their genes and a family environment) are far from identical in their intellects
and personalities. There must be causes that are neither genetic norcommon
to the family that make identical twins different and, more generally, make
people what they are." As with Bob Dylan's Mister Jones, something is hap¬
pening here but we don't know what it is.

A handy summary of the three laws is this: Genes 50 percent. Shared En¬
vironment 0 percent. Unique Environment 50 percent (or if you want to be
charitable. Genes 40-50 percent. Shared Environment 0-10 percent. Unique

380 /Hot Buttons

Environment 50 percent). A simple way ofremembering what we are trying to
explain is this: identical twins are 50 percent similar whether they grow up to¬
gether or apart. Keep this in mind and watch what happens to your favorite
ideas about the effects of upbringing in childhood.

THOUGH BEHAVIORAL GENETICISTS have known about the heritability of
mental traits (First Law) for decades, it took a while for the absence of effects
of the shared environment (Second Law) and the magnitude of the effects of
the unique environment (Third Law) to sink in. Robert Plomin and Denise
Daniels first sounded the alarm in a 1987 article called "Why Are Children in
the Same Family So Different from One Another?" The enigma was noted by
other behavioral geneticists such as Thomas Bouchard, Sandra Scarr, and
David Lykken and spotlighted again by David Rowe in his 1994 book The
Limits of Family Influence. It was also the springboard for the historian Frank
Sulloway's widely discussed 1996 book on birth order and revolutionary tem¬
perament, Bom to Rebel. Still, few people outside behavioral genetics really ap¬
preciated the importance of the Second and Third Laws.

It all hit the fan in 1998 when Judith Rich Harris, an unaffiliated scholar
(whom the press quickly dubbed "a grandmother from New Jersey"), pub¬
lished The Nurture Assumption. A Newsweek cover story summed up the topic:
"Do Parents Matter? A Heated Debate About How Kids Develop:’ Harris
brought the three laws out of the journals and tried to get people to recognize
their implications: that the conventional wisdom about childrearing among
experts and laypeople alike is wrong.

It was Rousseau who made parents and children the main actors in the
human drama." Children are noble savages, and their upbringing and educa¬
tion can either allow their essential nature to blossom or can saddle them with
the corrupt baggage of civilization. Twentieth-century versions of the Noble
Savage and the Blank Slate kept parents and children at center stage. The be-
haviorists claimed that children are shaped by contingencies of reinforcement,
and advised parents not to respond to their children's distress because it would
only reward them for crying and increase the frequency of crying behavior.
Freudians theorized that we are shaped by our degree of success in weaning,
toilet training, and identification with the parent of the same sex, and advised
parents not to bring infants into their beds because it would arouse damaging
sexual desires. Everyone theorized that psychological disorders could be
blamed on mothers: autism on their coldness, schizophrenia on their "double
binds;' anorexia on their pressureon girls to be perfect. Low self-esteem was
attributed to "toxic parents" and every other problem to "dysfunctional fami¬
lies." Patients in many forms of psychotherapy while away their fifty minutes
reliving childhood conflicts, and most biographies scavenge through the sub¬
ject's childhood for the roots ofthe grownup's tragedies and triumphs.

Children / 381

By now most well-educated parents believe that their children's fates are in
their hands, They want their children to be popular and self-confident, to get
good grades and stay in school, to avoid drugs, alcohol, and cigarettes, to avoid
getting pregnant or fathering a child while a teenager, to stay on the right side
of the law, and to become happily married and professionally successful. A pa¬
rade of parenting experts has furnished them with advice, ever changing in
content, never changing in certitude, on how to attain that outcome. The cur¬
rent recipe runs something like this. Parents should stimulate their babies with
colorful toys and varied experiences. ("Take them outside. Let them feel tree
bark;' advised a pediatrician who shared a couch with me on a morning tele¬
vision show.) They should read and talk to their babies as much as possible to
foster their language development. They should interact and communicate
with their children at all ages, and no amount oftime-is too much. ("Quality
time;' the idea that working parents could spend an intense interlude with
their children between dinner and bedtime to make up for their absence dur¬
ing the day, quickly became a national joke; it was seen as a rationalization by
mothers who would not admit that their careers were compromising their
children's welfare.) Parents should set firm but reasonable limits, neither boss¬
ing their children around nor giving them complete license. Physical punish¬
ment of any kind is out, because that perpetuates a cycle of violence. Nor
should parents belittle their children or say that they are bad, because that will
damage their self-esteem. On the contrary, they should shower them with
hugs and unconditional affirmations of love and approval. And parents
should communicate intensively with their adolescent children and take an in¬
terest in every aspect of their lives.

A few parents have begun to question the imperative to become round-
the-clock parenting machines. A recent cover story in Newsweek entitled "The
Parent Trap" reported on the frazzled mothers and fathers who devote every
nonworking minute to entertaining and chauffeuring their children for fear
that they will otherwise turn into ne'er-do-wells or cafeteria snipers. A similar
story in the Boston Globe Magazinev/ith the ironic title «How to Raise a Perfect
Child .. :' elaborates:

"I'm overwhelmed with parenting advice," saysAlice Kellyof Newton. «I
read all about how I'm supposed to be providing my children with en¬
riching play experiences. I'm supposed to do lots of physical activity
with them so 1 can instill in them a physical fitness habit so they’ll grow
up to be healthy, fit adults. And I'm supposed to do all kinds of intellec¬
tual play so they'll grow up smart. Also, there are all kinds of play, and
I'm supposed to do each-clay for finger dexterity, word games for read¬
ing success,large-motor play, small-motor play. 1 feel like 1 could devote
my life to figuring out what to play with my kids."...

3 82/Hot Buttons

Elizabeth Ward, a Stoneham dietician, has been puzzling over why
parents are so "willing to be short-order cooks, preparing two or three
meals at a time" in order to please the kids.... [One reason] is a belief
that forcing a kid to choose.between eating what’s presented or skipping
a meal will lead to eating disorders-a thought that probably never oc¬
curred to parents in earlier decades."

The humorist Dave Barry comments on the experts' advice to parents of ado¬
lescents:

In addition to watching for warning signs, you must "keep the lines of
communication open" between yourself and your child. Make a point of
taking an interest in the things your child is interested in so that you can
develop a rapport, as we see in this dialogue:

father: What’s that music you're listening to, son?
son: It’s a band called "Limp Bizkit,"Dad.
father: They suck.

... You should strive for this kind of closeness in your relationship with
your child. And remember: If worse comes to worst, there is no parenting
tool more powerful than a good hug. If you sense that your child is getting
into trouble, you must give that child a great big fat hug in a public place
with other young people around, while saying, in a loud, piercing voice,
"You are MYLITTLEBABY and I love you NO MATTER WHAT!" That
will embarrass your child so much that he or she may immediately run off
and join a strict religious order whose entire diet consists of gravel. If one
hug doesn't work, threaten to giveyour child another,"

Backlash aside, is it possible thatthe experts' advice might be sound? Per¬
haps the parent trap is the mixed blessing of scientists' knowing more and
more about the effects of parenting. Parents can be forgiven for carving out
some time for themselves, but if the experts are right they must realize that
every such decision is a compromise.

So what do we really know about the long-term effects of parenting? Nat¬
ural variation among parents, the raw material of behavioral genetics, offers one
way offinding out. In any large sample offamilies, parents vary in how well they
adhere to the ideals ofparenting (if some didn't stray from the ideal, there would
be no point in offering advice). Some mothers stay at home, others are worka¬
holics. Some parents lose their tempers, others are infinitely patient. Some are
garrulous, others taciturn; some unreserved in their affection, others more
guarded. (As one academic said to me after pulling out a picture of her toddler,
"We virtually adore her.") Some homes are filled with books, others with blaring

Children / 383

TV sets; some couples are lovey-dovey, others fight like Maggie and Iiggs.Some
mothers are like June Cleaver,others are depressed or histrionic or disorganized.
According to the conventional wisdom, these differences should make a differ¬
ence. At a bare minimum, two children growing up in one of these homes-
with the same mother, father, books, TVs.and everything else-should turn out
more similar, on average, than two children growing up in different homes. See¬
ing whether they do is a remarkably direct and powerful test. It does not depend
on any hypothesis about what parents have to do to change their children or
how their children will respond. It does not depend on how well we measure the
home environments. If anything that parents do affects their children in any sys¬
tematic way,then children growing up with the same parents will turn out more
similar than children growing up with different parents.

But they don't. Remember the discoveries behind the Second Law.Siblings
reared together end up no more similar than siblings separated at birth.
Adopted siblings are no more similar than strangers. And the similarities be¬
tween siblings can be completely accounted for by their shared genes. All those
differences among parents and homes have no predictable long-term effects
on the personalities of their children. Not to put too fine a point on it, but
much of the advice from the parenting experts is flapdoodle.

But surely the advice is grounded in research on children's development?
Yes, from the many useless studies that show a correlation between the behav¬
ior of parents and the behavior of their biological children and conclude that
the parenting shaped the child, as if there were no such thing as heredity. And
in fact the studies are even worse than that. Even if there were no such thing as
heredity, a correlation between parents and children would not imply that
parenting practices shape children. It could imply that children shape parent¬
ing practices.F As any parent of more than one child knows, children are not
indistinguishable lumps of raw material waiting to be shaped. They are little
people, born with personalities. And people react to the personalities of other
people, even if one is a parent and the other a child. The parents of an affec¬
tionate child may return that affection and thereby act differently from the
parents of a child who squirms and wipes off his parents' kisses. The parents of
a quiet, spacey child might feel they are talking to a wall and j abber at him less.
The parents of a docile child can get away with setting firm but reasonable lim¬
its; the parents of a hellion might find themselves at their wits' end and either
lay down the law or give up. In other words, correlation does not imply causa¬
tion. A correlation between parents and children does not mean that parents
affect children; it could mean that children affect parents, that genes affect
both parents and children, or both.

It gets worse. In many studies, the same parties (in some studies the par¬
ents, in others the children) supply the data on both the parents' behavior and
the child's. Parents tell the experimenter how they treat their children and

384 / Hot Buttons

what their children are like, or adolescents tell the experimenter what they are
like and how their parents treat them. Those studies-c-suspiciously-i-show
much stronger correlations than ones in which a third party assesses the par¬
ents and the child.P The problem is not just that people tend to look at them¬
selves and at their families through the same rose-colored or jaundiced lenses,
but also that the relationship between parents and adolescents is a two-way
street. Harris sums up the problems when commenting on a widely publicized
1997 study. The authors claimed, solely on the basis of teenagers' responses to
a questionnaire about themselves and their families, that "parent-family con¬
nectedness"-close bonds, high expectations, lots ofaffection-is "protective"
against adolescent ills such as drugs, cigarettes, and unsafe sex. Harris notes:

A happy person tends to check off upbeat answers to all the questions:

Yes, my parents are good to me; yes. I'm doing fine. A person who cares
about presenting a socially acceptable face to the world checks off so¬
cially acceptable responses: Yes, my parents are good to me; no, I haven't
been in any fights or smoked anything illegal. A person who is angry or
depressed checks off angry or depressed responses: My parents are jerks
and I flunked the algebra test and to hell with your questionnaire....

.. . Perhaps what misled those eighteen federal agencies into think¬
ing they were getting their 25 million dollars worth was the positive way
the researchers phrased their findings: good relationships with parents
exert a protective effect. Expressed in a different (but equally accurate)
way, the results sound less interesting: adolescents who don't get along
well with their parents are more likely to use drugs or engage in risky sex.

The results sound still less interesting expressed this way: adolescents who
use drugs or engage in risky sex don't get along well with their parents."

Yet another problem crops up when researchers direct all their questions
to the parents rather than to the offspring. People behave differently in differ¬
ent settings. That includes children, who tend to behave differently inside and
outside the home. So even if parents'behavior does affect how their children
behave with them, it may not affect how their children behave with other peo¬
ple. When parents describe their children's behavior, they describe the behav¬
ior they see in the home. To show that parents shape their children, then, a
study would have to control for genes (by testing twins or adoptees), distin¬
guish between parents affecting children and children affecting parents, mea¬
sure the parents and the children independently, look at how children behave
outside the home rather than inside, and test older children and young adults
to see whether any effects are transient or permanent. No study that has
claimed to show effects of parenting has met these standards. 35

If behavioral genetic studies show no lasting effects ofthe home, and stud-

Children / 385

ies of parenting practices are uninformative, what about studies that compare
radically different childhood milieus? The results, again, are bracing. Decades
of studies have shown that, all things being equal, children turn out pretty
much the same way whether their mothers work or stay at home, whether they
are placed in daycare or not, whether they have siblings or are only children,
whether their parents have a conventional or an open marriage, whether they
grow upin an Ozzie-and-Harriet home or a hippie commune, whether their
conceptions were planned, were accidental, or took place in a test tube, and
whether they have two parents of the same sex or one of each."

Even growing up without a father in the house, which does correlate with
troubles such as dropping out of school, remaining idle, and having babies
while a teenager, may not cause the troubles directly.V Children with experi¬
ences that should make up for the missing father, such as having a stepfather,
a live-in grandmother, or frequent contact with the birth father, are no better
off. The number of years that the father was in the house before leaving makes
no difference. And children whose fathers died do not have the poor outcomes
of children whose fathers walked out or were never there. The absence of a fa¬
ther may not be a cause of adolescent problems but a correlate of the true
causes, which may include poverty, neighborhoods with lots of unattached
men (who live in de facto polygyny and hence compete violently for status),
frequent moves (which force children to start from the bottom of the pecking
order in new peer groups), and genes that make both fathers and children
more impulsive and quarrelsome.

The 1990s was the Decade of the Brain and the decade in which parents
were told they were in charge of their babies' brains. The first three years of life
was described as a critical window of opportunity in which the child's brain
had to be constantly stimulated to keep it growing properly. Parents of late-
talking children were blamed for not blanketing them in enough verbiage; the
ills of the inner city were blamed on children's having to stare at empty walls.
Bill and Hillary Clinton convened a conference at the White House 'to learn
about the research, at which Mrs. Clinton said that the experiences of the first
three years "can determine whether children will grow up to be peaceful or vi¬
olent citizens, focused or undisciplined workers, attentive or detached parents
themselves.”38 The governors of Georgia and Missouri asked their legislators
for millions of dollars to issue every new mother with a Mozart CD. (They had
confused experiments on infant brain development with experiments-since
discredited-alleging that adults benefit from listening to a few minutes of
Mozart.)" The pediatrician and childcare guru T. Berry Brazelton had the
most hopeful suggestion of all: that nurturance during the first three years will
protect children from the lure of tobacco when they become adolescents."

In his book The Myth of the First Three Years, the cognitive neuroscience
expert Jon Bruer showed that there was no science behind these astonishing

386/Hot Buttons

claims." No psychologist has ever documented a critical period for cognitive
or language development that ends at three. And though depriving an animal
of stimulation (by sewing an eye shut or keeping it in a barren cage) may hurt
its brain growth, there is no evidence that providing extra stimulation (beyond
what the organism would encounter in its normal habitat) enhances its brain
growth.

So nothing in the research on family environments contradicts the behav¬
ioral geneticists' Second Law, which says that growing up in a particular fam¬
ily has little or no systematic effect on one's intellect and personality. And this
leaves us with a maddening puzzle. No, it's not all in the genes; around half the
variation in personality, intelligence, and behavior comes from something in
the environment. But whatever that something is, it cannot be shared by two
children growing up in the same home with the same parents. And that rules
out all the obvious somethings. What is the elusive Mister Jones factor?

refusing to give up on parents, some developmental psychologists have
trained their sights on the only remaining possibility that gives parents a star¬
ring role. The impotence of the shared environment says only that what par¬
ents do to all their children is powerless to shape them. But obviously parents
don't treat their children, alike. Perhaps the individualized parenting that
mothers and fathers adapt to each child does have the power to shape them. It
is the interaction between parents and children that affects them, not a one-
size-fits-all parenting philosophy.f

At first this looks reasonable. But when you think it through, it does not
restore a shaping role for parents, or for parenting advice, after all."

What would individualized parenting look like? Presumably parents
would tailor their parenting to the needs and talents of each child. A head¬
strong child would elicit firmer discipline than a compliant one; a fearful child
would elicit more protectiveness than a bold one. The problem, as we saw in an
earlier section, is that the differences in parenting cannot be separated from
the preexisting differences in the children. If the fearful child turns into a fear¬
ful adult, we don't know whether it was an effect of the overprotective parent
ora continuation of the fearfulness the child was born with.

And surprisingly, if children do elicit systematic differences in parenting it
would show up as an effect of the genes: it would go into the heritability term,
not the unique-environment term. The reason is that heritability is a measure
of correlation and cannot distinguish direct effects of the genes (proteins that
help wire the brain or trigger hormones) from indirect effects that operate
many links away. Earlier I mentioned that attractive people are more assertive,
presumably because they get accustomed to other people's kissing up to them.
That is a highly indirect effect of the genes and would make assertiveness her¬
itable even if there were no genes for assertive brains, just genes for violet eyes

Children / 387

to die for. Similarly, if children with certain innate traits make their parents
more patient, or encouraging, or strict, then parental patience, encouragement,
and strictness would also count as "heritable." Now, if such individualized par¬
enting does affect the way children turn out, a critic could legitimately say that
the direct effects of the genes had been overestimated, because some of them
would really be indirect effects of the children's genes on traits of the children
that affect their parents' behavior, which in turn affects the children. (The hy¬
pothesis is baroque, and 1 will soon show why it is unlikely to be true, but let's
assume it is true for argument's sake.) But at best, the effects of parenting
would be fighting with other genetic effects (direct and indirect) for some por¬
tion of the 40 to 50 percent of the variation attributed to the genes. The 50 per¬
cent attributable to the unique environment would still be up for grabs.

Here is what would have to happen if the effects of the unique environ¬
ment are to be explained by an interaction between parents and children (using
the statistician's technical sense ofthe word "interaction;'which is the one rel¬
evant to our puzzle). A given practice would have to affect some children one
way, and other children another way, and the two effects would have to cancel
out. For example, sparing the rod would have to spoil some children (making
them more violent) and teach others that violence is not a solution (making
them less violent). Displays of affection would have to make some children
more affectionate (because they identify with their parents) arid others less af¬
fectionate (because they react against their parents). The reason the effects
have to go in opposite directions is that if a parenting practice had a consistent
effect, on average, across all children, it would turn up as an effect of the shared
environment. Adopted siblings would be similar, sibs growing up together
would be more similar than sibs growing up apart-neither of which happens.
And if it was applied successfully to some kinds of children and was avoided,
or was ineffective, with other kinds, that would turn up as an effect ofthe genes.

The problems with the parent-child interaction idea now become obvi¬
ous. It is implausible that any parenting process would have such radically dif¬
ferent effects on different children that the sum of the effects (the shared
environment) would add up to zero. If hugging merely makes some children
more confident and has no effect on others, then the huggers should still have
more confident children on average (some becoming more confident, others
showing no change) than the cold fish. But, holding genes constant, they don't.
(To put it in technical terms familiar to psychologists: it is rare to find a perfect
crossover interaction, that is, an interaction with no main effects.) This is also,
by the way, one of the reasons that heritability itself almost certainly cannot be
reduced to child-specific parenting. Unless parents' behavior is completely de¬
termined by their child's inborn traits, some parents will behave somewhat
differently from others across the board, and that would turn up in effects of
the shared environment-which in fact are negligible.

388/Hot Buttons

But let's say that these parent-child interactions (in the technical sense) re¬
ally do exist, and really do shape the child. The moral would be that across-
the-board parenting advice is useless. Anything that parents do to make some
children better will make an equal number of children worse.

In any case, the parent-child interaction theory can be tested directly. Psy¬
chologists can measure how parents treat the different children within a fam¬
ily, and see if the treatments correlate with how the children turn out, holding
genes constant. The answer is that in almost every case they don't. Virtually all
the differences in parenting within a family can be explained as reactions to
genetic differences that the children were born with. And parental behavior
that does differ among children for nongenetic reasons, such as marital con¬
flict triggered by some siblings but not by others, or more parenting effort di¬
rected at one sibling than at another, has no effect." The leader of a recent
heroic study, who had hoped to prove that differences in parenting do affect
how children turn out, confessed that he was "shocked" by his own results."

There is another way that a home environment could differ among chil¬
dren in the same family for reasons having nothing to do with their genes:
birth order. A firstborn usually has several years of undivided parental atten¬
tion with no annoying siblings around. Laterborns have to compete with their
siblings for parental attention and other family resources, and have to figure
out how to hold their own against stronger and more entrenched competitors.

In Born to Rebel, Sulloway predicted that firstborns should parlay their
advantages into a more assertive personality." And because they identify with
their parents, and by extension with the status quo, they should grow up to be
more conservative and conscientious. Laterborns, in contrast, should be more
conciliatory and open to new ideas and experiences. Though family therapists
and laypeople have had these impressions for a long time, Sulloway tried to ex¬
plain them in terms of Trivets's theory of parent-offspring -conflict and its
corollary, sibling rivalry. He found some support for these ideas in a meta¬
analysis (a quantitative literature review) of studies of birth order and person¬
ality.?

Sulloway's theory, however, also requires that children use the same strate¬
gies outside the home-with their peers and colleagues-as the ones that
served them well inside the home. That does not follow from Trivets's theory;
indeed, it contradicts the larger theory from evolutionary psychology that re¬
lationships with blood relatives should be very different from relationships
with nonrelatives. Tactics that work on a sibling or parent may not work so
well on a colleague or stranger. And in fact subsequent analyses have shown
that any effects of birth order on personality turn up in the studies that ask sib¬
lings or parents to rate one another, or to rate themselves with respect to a sib¬
ling, which of course can assess only their family relationships. When
personality is measured by neutral parties outside the family, birth-order ef-

Children / 389

fects diminish or disappear." Any differences in the parenting of firstborns
and laterborns-novice or experienced parents, divided or undivided attention,
pressure to carryon the family legacy or indulgent babying-seem to have
little or no effect on personality outside the home.

Similarities within a home don't shape children; differences within a
home don't shape children. Perhaps, Harris says, we should look outside the
home.

IF you grew up in a different part of the world from where your parents
grew up, consider this question: Do you sound like your parents, or like the
people you grew up with? What about the way you dress, or the music you lis¬
ten to, or the way you spend your free time? Consider the same question about
your children if they grew up in a different part of the world from where you
grew up-or for that matter, even if they didn't. In almost every case, people
model themselves after their peers, not their parents.

This is Harris's explanation of the elusive environmental shaper of per¬
sonality, which she calls Group Socialization theory. It's not all in the genes,
but what isn't in the genes isn't from the parents either. Socialization-acquir¬
ing the norms and skills necessary to function in society—takes place in the
peer group. Children have cultures, too, which absorb parts of the adult cul¬
ture and also develop values and norms of their own. Children do not spend
their waking hours trying to become better and better approximations of
adults. They strive to be better and better children, ones that function well in
their own society. It is in this crucible that our personalities are formed.

Multidecade, child-obsessed parenting, Harris points out, is an evolu-
tionarily recent practice. In foraging societies, mothers carry their children on
their hips or backs and nurse them on demand until the next child arrives two
to four years later." The child is then dumped into a play group with his older
siblings and cousins, switching from being the beneficiary of almost all of the
mother's attention to almost none of it. Children sink or swim in the milieu of
other children.

Children are not just attracted to the norms of their peers; to some degree
they are immune to the expectations of their parents. The theory of parent¬
offspring conflict predicts that parents do not always socialize a child in the
child's best interests. So even if children acquiesce to their parents' rewards,
punishments, examples, and naggings for the time being-because they are
smaller and have no choice-they should not, according to the theory, allow
their personalities to be shaped by these tactics. Children must learn what it
takes to gain status among their peers, because status at one age gives them a
leg up in the struggle for status at the next, including the young-adult stages in
which they first compete for the attention of the opposite sex."

What first attracted me to Harris's theory was its ability to explain a half-

390/ Hot Buttons

.dozen puzzling facts in the part of psychology I work in the most, language."
Psycholinguists argue a lot about heredity and environment, but they all
equate "the environment" with «parents:' But many phenomena of children's
language development just don't fit that equation. In traditional cultures,
mothers don't say much to their children until they are old enough to hold up
their end of the conversation; the children pick up language from other chil¬
dren. People’s accents almost always resemble the accents of their childhood
peers, not the accents of their parents. Children of immigrants acquire the lan¬
guage of their adopted homeland perfectly, without a foreign accent, as long as
they have access to native speaking peers. They then try to force their parents
to switch to the new language, and if they succeed, they may forget the mother
tongue entirely. The same is true of hearing children of deaf parents, who learn
the spoken language of their community without a hitch. Children thrown to¬
gether without a common language from the grownups will quickly invent
one; that is how creole languages, and the signed languages of the deaf, came
into being. Now, a particular language like English or Japanese (as opposed to
'the instinct for language in general) is an example of learned social behavior
par excellence. If children cultivate a fine ear for the nuances of their peers'
speech, and if they cast their lot with their peers' language over their parents',
it suggests that their social antennae are aimed peerward.

Children of immigrants soak up not just the language of their adopted
homeland but the culture as well. For their entire lives, my shtetl-born grand¬
parents were strangers in a strange land. Cars, banks, doctors, schools, and the
urban concept oftime left them baffled, and if the term «dysfunctional family"
had been around in the 1930s and 1940s it would surely have applied to them.
Nevertheless, my father, growing up in a community of immigrants who had
arrived in different decades, gravitated to other children and families who
knew the ropes, and ended up happy and successful. Such stories are common
in chronicles of the immigrant experience.F So why do we insist that chil¬
dren's parents are the key to how they turn out?

Studies also confirm what every parent knows but what no one bothers to
reconcile with theories of child development: that whether adolescents smoke,
get into scrapes with the law, or commit serious crimes depends far more on
what their peers do "than on what their parents dO.® Harris comments on a
popular theory that children become delinquents to achieve «mature status;'
that is, adult power and privilege: "If teenagers wanted to be like adults they
wouldn't be shoplifting nailpolish from drugstores or hanging off overpasses
to spray i love you LI8A on the arch. If they really aspired to 'mature status'
they would be doing boring adult things like sorting the laundry and figuring
out their income taxes."54

Even the rare finding of an effect of the shared environment, and the
equally elusive finding of an interaction between genes and the environment.

Children / 391

emerge only when we substitute peers for parents in the "environment" part of
the equation. Children who grow up in the same home tend to resemble each
other in their vulnerability to delinquency, regardless of how closely related
they are. But that similarity only holds if they are close in age and spend time
together outside the home-which suggests they belong to the same peer
group." And in a large Danish adoption study, the biological children of con¬
victs were somewhat more likely to get into trouble than the biological chil¬
dren of law-abiding citizens, which suggests a small across-the-board effect of
the genes. But the susceptibility to crime was multiplied if they were adopted
by parents who were criminals themselves and who lived in a large city, which
suggests that the genetically at-risk children grew up in a high-crime neigh¬
borhood."

It's not that parents "don't matter." In many ways parents matter a great
deal. For most of human existence, the most important thing parents did for
their children was keep them alive. Parents can certainly harm their children by
abusing or neglecting them. Children appear to need some kind of nurturing
figure in their early years, though it needn't be a parent, and possibly not even
an adult: young orphans and refugees often turn out relatively well if they had
the comfort of other children, even if they had no parents or other adults
around them." (This does not mean that the children were happy, but contrary
to popular belief, unhappy children do not necessarily turn into dysfunctional
adults.) Parents select an environment for their children and thereby select a
peer group. They provide their children with skills and knowledge, such as
reading and playing a musical instrument. And they certainly may affect their
children's behavior in the home, just as any powerful people can affect behav¬
ior within their fiefdom. But parents' behavior does not seem to shape their
children's intelligence or personality over the long term. Upon hearing this,
many people ask, "So you're saying it doesn't matter how I treat my child?" It is
a revealing question, and I will consider it at the end of the chapter. But first,
the public reaction to Harris's theory, and my own assessment.

the nurture assumption was, by any standard, a major contribution to
modern intellectual life. Though the main idea is at first counterintuitive, the
book has the ring of truth, with real children running through it, not com¬
pliant little theoretical constructs that no one ever meets in real life. Harris
backed up her hypothesis with voluminous data from many fields, interpreted
with a keen analytical eye, and with a rarity in the social sciences: proposals for
new empirical tests that might falsify it. The book also contains original policy
suggestions on tough problems for which we sorely need new ideas, such as
failing schools.teenage smoking, and juvenile delinquency. Evenif major parts
turn out to be wrong, the book forces one to think about childhood, and there¬
fore what makes us what we are, in a fresh and insightful way.

392 / Hot Buttons

So what was the public reaction? The first popular presentation of the the¬
ory was in a few pages of my book How the Mind Works, in which I presented
the research behind the three laws of behavioral genetics and Harris's 1995
paper explaining them. Many reviews singled out those pages for discussion,
such as the following analysis by Margaret Wertheim:

Never in my fifteen years as a science writer have I seen the subject I love

so dearly abused so greatly_What is so appalling here-quite aside

from the laughable grasp of family dynamics-is the misrepresentation
of science. Science can never prove what percentage of personality is
caused by upbringing.... By suggesting that it can and does, he invites
us to see scientists as at best naive and at worst fascistic. 11 is precisely
this kind of claim that, in my opinion, is giving science a bad name and
is helping to fuel a significant backlash against it.58

Wertheim, of course, confused «the percentage of personality that is caused by
upbringing;' which is indeed meaningless, with the percentage of variance in
personality that is caused by variation in upbringing, which behavioral ge¬
neticists study all the time. And scientists can show, and have shown, that sib¬
lings are as similar when reared apart as when reared together and that
adoptive siblings are not similar at all, which means that the conventional wis¬
dom about "family dynamics" is simply wrong.

Wertheim is sympathetic to radical science and social constructionism.
Her reaction is a sign of how behavioral genetics-and Harris's theory, which
aims to explain its findings-touches a nerve on the political left, with its tra¬
ditional emphasis on the malleability of children. The psychologist Oliver
James wrote, "Harris's book can be safely ignored as yet another application of
Friedmanite economics to the social realm" (an allusion to the economist who,
according to James, stands for the idea that individuals should assume respon¬
sibility for their own lives). He suggested that Harris was downplaying re¬
search on parenting because it "would indirectly pose a real challenge to the
theories of advanced consumer capitalism: if what parents do is critical, it calls
into question the low priority given to it, compared with the pursuit of
profit."59 Actually, this fanciful diagnosis has it backwards. The most vehement
propagandists for the importance of parents are the beer and tobacco compa¬
nies, which sponsor ad campaigns such as "Family Talk About Drinking" and
"Parents Should Talk to Kids About Not Smoking." (A sample ad: "Daughter
speaks to the camera, as if it were her mother, reassuring her that her words
about not smoking are with her, even when her mother is not with her,")?" By
putting the onus on parents to keep teens sober and smoke-free, these ad¬
vanced consumer capitalists can divert attention from their own massive in¬
fluence on adolescent peer culture.

Children / 393

In any case, Harris drew even more venom from the political right. The
columnist John Leo called her theory «stupid;' ridiculed her lack of a Ph.D.
and a university affiliation, and compared her to deniers of the Holocaust. He
ended his column, «It's not time to celebrate a foolish book that justifies self¬
absorption and makes non-parenting a respectable, mainstream activity."61
Why do conservatives hate the theory too? An axiom of the contemporary
American right is that the traditional family is under assault from feminists, a
licentious popular culture, and left-wing social analysts. The root of social ills,
conservatives believe, is the failure of parents to teach their children discipline
and values, a failure that can be traced to working mothers, absent fathers, easy
divorce, and a welfare system that rewards young women for having babies out
ofwedlock. When the unmarried sitcom character Murphy Brown had a child.
Vice President Dan Quayle denounced her for setting a bad example for Amer¬
ican women (a headline of the time: «Murphy Has a Baby; Quayle Has a
Cow"). Harris's review showing that Murphy’s baby would probably have
turned out fine was not welcome. (To be fair, concerns about fatherlessness
may not be ill founded, but the problem maybe the absence of fathers from all
the families in a neighborhood rather than the absence of a father from an in¬
dividual family. These fatherless children lack access to ot/terfamilies in which
an adult male is present, and worse, they have access to packs of single men,
whose values trickle down to their own peer groups.) Also, the Great Satan,
Hillary Clinton, had written a book on childhood called It Takes a Village,
based on the African saying “It takes a village to raise a child:’ Conservatives
despised it because they thought the whole idea was a pretext for social engi¬
neers to take childrearing out of the hands of parents and give it to the gov¬
ernment. But Harris quoted the saying too, and her theory implies there is
some truth to it.

And then there were the experts. Brazelton called the thesis "absurd."?
Jerome Kagan, one of the deans of scholarly research on children, said, "I'm
embarrassed for psychology.t"' Another developmental psychologist, Frank
Farley, told Newsweek:

She's all wrong. She's taking an extreme position based on a limited set
ofdata. Her thesis is absurd on its face, but consider what might happen
if parents believe this stuff! Will it free some to mistreat their kids, since
"it doesn't matter"? Will it tell parents who are tired after a long day that
they needn’t bother even paying any attention to their kid since "it
doesn’t matter"?64

Kagan and other developmentalists told reporters about the "many, many
good studies that show parents can affect how children turn out."

What were these "many, many good studies"? In the Boston Globe, Kagan

394 / Hot Buttons

laid out what he called the "ample evidence."65 He mentioned the usual see-
no-genetics studies showing that smart parents have smart children, verbal
parents have verbal children, and so on. He observed that “a 6-year-old raised
in New England will be very different from a 6-year-old raised in Malaysia,
Uganda, or the southern tip of Argentina. The reason is that they experience
different child-rearing practices by their parents." But of course a child grow¬
ing up in Malaysia has both Malaysian parents and Malaysian peers. If Kagan
had considered what would happen to a six-year-old child of Malaysian par¬
ents who grew up in a New England town, he might have thought twice before
using the example to illustrate the power of parenting. The other "evidence"
was that when authors write their memoirs, they credit their parents, never
their childhood friends, with making them what they are. An irony in these
feeble arguments is that Kagan himself, in the course of a distinguished career,
often chided his fellow psychologists for overlooking genetics and for accept¬
ing their culture's folk theories *on childhood instead of holding them up to
scientific scrutiny. I can only imagine that on this occasion he felt compelled
to defend his field against an expose by a grandmother from New Jersey. In any
case, the other «good studies" produced by defensive psychologists were no
more informative."

SO HAS HARRIS solved the mystery of the Third Law, the unique environ¬
ment that comes neither from the genes nor from the family?Not exactly. I am
convinced that children are socialized-that they acquire the values and skills
of the culture-in their peer groups, not their families. But I am not con¬
vinced, at least not yet, that peer groups explain how children develop their
personalities: why they turn out shy or bold, anxious or confident, open-
minded or old-school. Socialization and the development of personality are
not the same thing, and peers may explain the first without necessarily ex¬
plaining the second.

One way that peers could explain personality is that children in the same
family may join different peer groups-the jocks, the brains, the preppies, the
punks, the Goths-and assimilate their values. But then how do children get
sorted into peer groups? If it is by their inborn traits-smart kids join the
brains, aggressive kids join the punks, and so on-then effects of the peer
group would show up as indirect effects of the genes, not as effects of the
unique environment. If it is their parents' choice of neighborhoods, it would
turn up as effects of the shared environment, because siblings growing up to¬
gether share a neighborhood as well as a set of parents. In some cases, as with
delinquency and smoking, the missing variance might be explained as an in¬
teraction between genes and peers: violence-prone adolescents become vio¬
lent only in dangerous neighborhoods, addiction-prone children become
smokers only in the company of peers who think smoking is cool. But those

Children / 395

interactions are unlikely to explain most of the differences among children.
Let’s return to our touchstone: identical twins growing up together. They share
their genes, they share their family environments, and they share their peer
groups, at least on average. But the correlations between them are only around
SO percent. Ergo, neither genes nor families nor peer groups can explain what
makes them different.

Harris is forthcoming about this limitation, and suggests that children
differentiate themselves within a peer group, not by their choice of a peer
group. Within each group, some become leaders, others foot soldiers, still oth¬
ers jesters, loose cannons, punching bags, or peacemakers, depending on what
niche is available, how suited a child is to filling it, and chance. Once a child ac¬
quires a role, it is hard to shake it off, both because other children force the
child to stay in the niche and because the child specializes in the skills neces¬
sary to prosper in it. This part of the theory, Harris notes, is untested, and dif¬
ficult to test, because the crucial first step-s-which child fills which niche in
which group--is so capricious.

The filling of niches in peer groups, then, is largely a matter of chance. But
once we allow Lady Luck into the picture, she can act at other stages in life.
When reminiscing on how we got to where we are, we all can think of forks in
the road where we could have gone on very different life paths. If I hadn't gone
to that party, I wouldn't have met my spouse. If I hadn't picked up that
brochure, I wouldn't have known about the field that would become my life's
calling. If I hadn't answered the phone, if I hadn't missed that flight, if only I
had caught that ball. Life is a pinball game in which we bounce and graze
through a gantlet of chutes and bumpers. Perhaps our history of collisions and
near misses explains what made us what we are. One twin was once beaten up
by a bully, the other was home sick that day. One inhaled a virus, the other
didn't. One twin got the top bunk bed, the other got the bottom bunk bed.

We still don't know whether these unique experiences leave their finger¬
prints on our intellects and personalities. But an even earlier pinball game cer¬
tainly could do so, the one that wires up our brain in the womb and early
childhood. As I have mentioned, the human genome cannot possibly specify
every last connection among neurons. But the "environment;' in the sense of
information encoded by the sense organs, isn't the only other option. Chance
is another. One twin lies one way in the womb and stakes out her share of tlie
placenta, the other has to squeeze around her. A cosmic ray mutates a stretch
of DNA, a neurotransmitter zigs instead of zags, the growth cone of an axon
goes left instead ofright, and one identical twin's brain might gel into a slightly
different configuration from the other's."

We know this happens in the development of other organisms. Even ge¬
netically homogeneous strains of flies, mice, and worms, raised in monoto¬
nously controlled laboratories, can differ from one another. A fruit fly may

396/Hot Buttons

have more or fewer bristles under one wing than its bottlemates. One mouse
may have three times as many oocytes (cells destined to become eggs) as her
genetically identical sister reared in the same lab. One roundworm may live
three times as long as its virtual clone in the next dish. The biologist Steven
Austad commented on the roundworms' lifespans: "Astonishingly, the degree
of variability they exhibit in longevity is not much less than that of a gene¬
tically mixed population of humans, who eat a variety of diets, attend to or
abuse their health, and are subject to all the vagaries of circumstance-car
crashes, tainted beef, enraged postal workers-of modern industrialized
life."68 And a roundworm is composed of only 959 cells! A human brain,with
its hundred billion neurons, has even more opportunities to be buffeted by the
outcomes of molecular coin flips.

If chance in development is to explain the less-than-perfect similarity of
identical twins, it says something interesting about development in general.
One can imagine a developmental process in which millions of small chance
events cancel one another out, leaving no difference in the end product. One
can imagine a different process in which a chance event could derail develop¬
ment entirely, or send it on a chaotic developmental path resulting in a freak
or a monster. Neither of these happens to identical twins. They are distinct
enough that our crude instruments can pick up the differences, yet both are
healthy instances of that staggeringly improbable, exquisitely engineered sys¬
tem we call a human being. The development of organisms must use complex
feedback loops rather than prespecified blueprints. Random events can divert
the trajectory of growth, but the trajectories are confined within an envelope
of functioning designs for the species. Biologists refer to such developmental
dynamics as robustness, buffering, or canalization/"

If the nongenetic component of personality is the outcome of neurodevel-
opmental roulette, it would present us with two surprises. One is that just as
the "genetic" term in the behavioral geneticist's equation is not necessarily ge¬
netic, the "environmental" term is not necessarily environmental. If the unex¬
plained variance is a product of chance events in brain assembly, yet another
chunk of our personalities would be "biologically determined" (though not
genetic) and beyond the scope of the best-laid plans of parents and society.

The other surprise is that we may have to make room for a pre-scientific
explanatory concept in our view of human nature-not free will, as many
people have suggested to me, but fate. It is not free will because among the
traits that may differ between identical twins reared together are ones that are
stubbornly involuntary. No one chooses to become schizophrenic, homosex¬
ual, musically gifted, or, for that matter, anxious or self-confident or open to
experience. But the old idea of fate-in the sense of uncontrollable fortune,
not strict predestination-can be reconciled with modern biology once we re¬
member the many openings for chance to operate in development. Harris,

Children / 397

noting how recent and parochial is the belief that we can shape our children,
quotes a woman living in a remote village of India in the 1950s. When asked
what kind of man she hoped her child would grow into, she shrugged and
replied, " It is in his fate, no matter what I want,"?"

not everyone is so accepting of fate, or of the other forces beyond a par¬
ent’s control, like genes and peers. “I hope to God this isn't true," one mother
said to the Chicago Tribune. "The thought that all this love that I’m pouring
into him counts for nothing is too terrible to contemplate,"?' As with other
discoveries about human nature, people hope to God it isn't true. But the truth
doesn't care about our hopes, and sometimes it can force us to revisit those
hopes in a liberating way.

Yes, it is disappointing that there is no algorithm for growing a happy and
successful child. But would we really want to specify the traits of our children
in advance, and never be delighted by the unpredictable gifts and quirks that
every child brings into the world? People are appalled by human cloning and
its dubious promise that parents can design their children by genetic engi¬
neering. But how different is that from the fantasy that parents can design
their children by how they bring them up? Realistic parents would be less anx¬
ious parents. They could enjoy their time with their children rather than con¬
stantly trying to stimulate them, socialize them, and improve their characters.
They could read stories to their children for the pleasure of it, not because it's
good for their neurons.

Many critics accuse Harris of trying to absolve parents of responsibility
for their children's lives: if the kids turn out badly, parents can say it's not their
fault. But by the same token she is assigning adults responsibility for their own
lives: ifyour life is not going well, stop moaning that it's all your parents' fault.
She is rescuing mothers from fatuous theories that blame them for every mis¬
fortune that befalls their children, and from the censorious know-it-alls who,
make them feel like ogres if they slip out of the house to work or skip a read¬
ing of Goodnight Moon. And the theory assigns us all a collective responsibil¬
ity for the health of the neighborhoods and culture in which peer groups are
embedded.

Finally: "So you're saying it doesn't matter how I treat my children?" What
a question! Yes,of course it matters. Harris reminds her readers ofthe reasons.

First, parents wield enormous power over their children, and their actions
can make a big difference to their happiness. Childrearing is above all an ethi¬
cal responsibility. It is not OK for parents to beat, humiliate, deprive, or neglect
their children, because those are awful things for a big strong person to do to a
small helpless one. As Harris writes, "We may not hold their tomorrows in our
hands but we surely hold their todays, and we have the power to make their to¬
days very miserable."72

398/Hot Buttons

Second, a parent and a child have a human relationship. No one ever asks,
"So you're saying it doesn't matter how I treat my husband or wife?" even
though no one but a newlywed believes that one can change the personality of
one's spouse. Husbands and wives are nice to each other (or should be) not to
pound-the other's personality into a desired shape but to build a deep and sat¬
isfying relationship. Imagine being told that one cannot revamp the personal¬
ity of a husband or wife and replying, "The thought that all this love I’m
pouring into him (or her) counts for nothing is too terrible to contemplate:'
So it is with parents and children: one person's behavior toward another has
consequences for the quality of the relationship between them. Over the
course of a lifetime the balance of power shifts, and children, complete with
memories of how they were treated, have a growing say in their dealings with
their parents. As Harris puts it, "If you don't think the moral imperative is a
good enough reason to be nice to your kid, try this one: Be nice to your kid
when he's young so that he will be nice to you when you're 0Id.”?3 There are
well-functioning adults who still shake with rage when recounting the cruel¬
ties their parents inflicted on them as children. There are others who moisten
up in private moments when recalling a kindness or sacrifice made for their
happiness, perhaps one that the mother or father has long forgotten. If for no
other reason, parents should treat their children well to allow them to grow up
with such memories.

I have found that when people hear these explanations they lower their
eyes and say,somewhat embarrassedly, "Yes. I knew that." The fact that people
can forget these simple truths when intellectualizing about children shows
how far modern doctrines have taken us. They make it easy to think of chil¬
dren as lumps of putty to be shaped instead of partners in a human relation¬
ship. Even the theory that children adapt to their peer group becomes less
surprising when we think of them as human beings like ourselves. "Peer
group" is a patronizing term we use in connection with children for what we
call "friends and colleagues and associates" when we talk about ourselves. We
groan when children obsess over wearing the right kind of cargo pants, but we
would be just as mortified if a very large person forced us to wear pink overalls
to a corporate board meeting or a polyester disco suit to an academic confer¬
ence. "Being socialized by a peer group" is another way of saying "living suc¬
cessfully within a society:' which for a social organism means "living:' It is
children, above all, who are alleged to be blank slates, and that can make us
forget they are people.

Children / 399

Chapter 20

The Arts

THE ARTS ARE in trouble. I didn't say it; they did: the critics, scholars, and (as
we now say) content providers who make their living in the arts and humani¬
ties. According to the theater director and critic Robert Brustein:

The possibility of sustaining high culture in our time is becoming in¬
creasingly problematical. Serious book stores are losing their franchise;
small publishing houses are closing shop; little magazines are going out
ofbusiness; nonprofit theaters are surviving primarily by commercializ¬
ing their repertory; symphony orchestras are diluting their programs;
public television is increasing its dependence on reruns of British sit¬
coms; classical radio stations are dwindling; museums are resorting to
blockbuster shows; dance is dying. 1

In recent years the higher-brow magazines and presses have been filled with
similar laments. Here is a sample of titles:

The Death ofLiterature- *The Decline and Fall ofLiterature' • The De¬
cline of High Culture” • Have the Humanities Disciplines Collapsedr? •

The Humanities-At Twilighti? • Humanities in the Age of Money" •

The Humanities’ Plight" • Literature: An Embattled Profession? • Liter¬
ature Lost'? • Music's Dying Fall!' • The Rise and Fall of English" •
What’s Happened to the Humanitiesr" • Who Killed Culturei'"

Ifwe are to believe the pessimists, the decline has been going on for some time.
In 1948 T. S. Eliot wrote, “We can assert with some confidence that our own
period is one of decline; that the standards of culture are lower than they were
fifty years ago; and that the evidences of this decline are visible in every de¬
partment of human activity'!"

400 /Hot Buttons

Some of the vital signs of the arts and humanities are indeed poor. In 1997
the U.S. House of Representatives voted to kill the National Endowment for
the Arts) and the Senate was able to save it only by cutting its budget nearly in
half. Universities have disinvested in the humanities: since 1960, the propor¬
tion of faculty in liberal arts has fallen by half, salaries and working conditions
have stagnated, and more and more teaching is done by graduate students and
part-time faculty.PNew Ph.D.s are often unemployed or resigned to a life of
one-year appointments. In many liberal arts colleges,humanities departments
have been downsized, merged, or eliminated altogether.

One cause of the decline in academia is competition from the efflores¬
cence of science and engineering. Another may be a surfeit of Ph.D.s pumped
out by graduate programs that failed to practice academic birth control. But
the problem is as much a reduction in the demand by students as an increase
in the supply of professors. While the total number of'bachelor’s degrees rose
by almost 40 percent between 1970 and 1994, the number of degrees in En¬
glish declined by 40 percent. It may get worse: only 9 percent of high school
students today indicate an interest in majoring in the humanities.i? One uni¬
versity was so desperate to restore enrollment in its College of Arts and Sci¬
ences that it hired an advertising firm to come up with a "Think for a Living"
campaign. Here are some of the slogans they came up with:

Do what you want when you graduate or wait 20 years for your mid¬
life crisis.

Insurance for when the robots take over all the boring jobs.

Okay then. Follow your dreams in your next life.

Yeah, like your parents are so happy.

Careerism may explain the disenchantment some students feel with lib¬
eral arts) but not all of it. The economy is in better shape today than it was in
periods in which the humanities were more popular, and many young people
still do not shoot themselves from cannons into their careers but use their col¬
lege years to enrich themselves in various ways. There is no good reason that
the arts and humanities should not be able to compete for students' attention
during this interlude. A knowledge of culture, history, and ideas is still an asset
in most professions, as it is in everyday life. But students stay away from the
humanities anyway.

In this chapter I will diagnose the malaise of the arts and humanities and
offer some suggestions for revitalizing them. They didn’t ask me, but by their
own accounts they need all the help theycan get, and I believe that part of the
answer lies within the theme of this book. I will begin by circumscribing the
problem.

The Arts / 401

As a matter offact, the arts and humanities are not in trouble. According
to recent assessments based on data from the National Endowment for the
Arts and the Statistical Abstract of the United States, they have never been in
better shape, is In the past two decades, symphony orchestras, booksellers, li¬
braries, and new independent films have all increased in number. Attendance
is up, in some cases at record levels, at classical music concerts, live theater,
opera performances, and art museums, as we see in blockbuster shows with
long lines and scarce tickets. The number of books in print (including books
of art, poetry, and drama) has exploded, as have book sales. Nor have people
become passive consumers of art. The year 1997 broke records for the pro¬
portion of adults drawing, taking art photographs, buying art, and doing cre¬
ative writing.

Advances in technology have made art more accessible than ever before. A
couple of hours of minimum-wage income can buy any of tens of thousands
of audiophile-quality musical recordings, including many versions of any clas¬
sical work performed by the world's great orchestras. Video stores allow people
in the boondocks to arrange cheap private screenings of the great classics of
cinema. Instead of the three television networks with their sitcoms, variety
shows, and soaps, most Americans can now choose from a menu of fifty to a
hundred, stations, including ones that specialize in history, science, politics,
and the arts. Inexpensive video equipment and streaming video on the World
Wide Web are allowing independent filmmaking to flourish. Virtually any
book in print is available within days to anyone with a credit card and a
modem. On the Web one can find the text of all the major novels, poems, plays,
and works of philosophy and scholarship that have fallen out of copyright, as
well as virtual tours of the world's great art museums. New intellectual e-zines
and web sites have proliferated, and back issues are instantly available.

We are swimming in culture, drowning in it. So why all the lamentations
about its plight, decline, fall, collapse, twilight, and death?

One response from the doomsayers is that the current frenzy of consump¬
tion involves past classics and current mediocrities but that few new works of
quality are coming into the world. That is doubtful. 19 As historians of the arts
repeatedly tell us, all the supposed sins of contemporary culture-mass appeal,
the profit motive, themes of sex and violence, and adaptations to popular for¬
mats (such as serialization in newspapers)-may be found in the great artists
of past centuries. Even in recent decades, many artists were seen in their time
as commercial hacks and only later attained artistic respectability. Examples
include the Marx Brothers, Alfred Hitchcock, the Beatles, and, if we are tojudge
by recent museum shows and critical appreciations, even Norman Rockwell.
There are dozens of excellent novelists from countries all over the world, and
though most television and cinema is dreadful, the best can be very good in-

402 / Hot Buttons

deed: Carla on Cheers was wittier than Dorothy Parker, and the plot of Tootsie
is cleverer than the plots of any of Shakespeare's cross-dressing comedies.

As for music, though it may be hard for anyone to compete against the
best composers from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the past century
has been anything but barren. Jazz, Broadway, country, blues, folk, rock, soul,
samba, reggae, world masic, and contemporary composition have blossomed.
Each has produced gifted artists and has introduced new complexities of
rhythm, instrumentation, vocal style, and studio production into our total
musical experience. Then there are genres that are flourishing as never before,
such as animation and industrial design, and still others that have only re¬
cently come into existence but have already achieved moments ofhigh accom¬
plishment, such as computer graphics and rock videos (for instance, Peter
Gabriel's Sledgehammer),

In every era for thousands of years critics have bemoaned the decline of
culture, and the economist Tyler Cowen suggests they are the victims of a cog¬
nitive illusion. w r art ar more likely o app ar in a pa .t dade

t an in the pre ent decade for the same rea on that ano her line in the up r-
market alway move faster than the one you are in: there ar m re them.
We get to enjoy the greatest hits winnowed from all those decades, listening to
the Mozarts and forgetting the Salieris. Also, genres of art (opera. Impression¬
ist painting, Broadway musicals, film noir) usually blossom and fade in a finite
span of time. It's hard to recognize nascent art forms when they are on the rise,
and by the time they are widely appreciated theirjaest days are behind them.
Cowen also notes, citing Hobbes, that is a fratiflr

~handeg waY-of "ptrttmB dowrrtme^ muia "Competition of praise inclineth to
a reverence of antiquity. For men contend with the living, not with the dead,'?"

But in three ir urn 1 rib d r a the rt ally do ave o ethin t b de¬
pressed about. One is the traditions of e ite art hat descended from prestigious
European genres, uch as the music per ormed by s mphonyorche tra th art
shown in major galleries and museums, and the bulle erformed by major
companies. Here there really may be a drought ofcompe ingnew material. For
example, 90 percent of "classical music” was composed before 1900, and the
most influential composers in the twentieth century were active before 1940. 21

The second is the guild of fS^pS^and cultural gatekeepers, who have seen
their influence dwindle. The 1939 comedy The Man Who Came to Dinner is
about a literary critic who achieved such celebrity that we can believe that the
burghers of a small Ohio town would coo and fawn over him. It is hard to
think of a contemporary critic who could plausibly inspire such a character.

And the third, of course, is the groves of academe, where the foibles of the
humanities departments have been fodder for satirical novels and the subject
of endless fretting and analyzing.

After nineteen chapters, you can probably guess where I will seek a diag-

The Arts / 403

nosis for these three ailing endeavors. The giveaway lies in a statement (attrib¬
uted to Virginia Woolf) that can be found in countless English course outlines:
“On or about December, 1910, human nature changed." She was referring to
the new philosophy ofmodernism that would dominate the elite arts and crit¬
icism for much of the twentieth century, and whose denial of human nature
was carried over with a vengeance to postmodernism, which seized control in
its later decades. The point of this chapter is that the elite arts, criticism, and
scholarship are in trouble because the statement is wrong. Human nature did
not change ill 1910, or in any year thereafter. 22

ART is in our nature-in the blood and in the bone, as people used to say; in
the brain and in the genes, as we might say today. In all societies people dance,
sing, decorate surfaces, and tell and act out stories. Children begin to take part
in these activities in their twos and threes, and the arts may even be reflected
in the organization of the adult brain: neurological damage may leave a person
able to hear and see but unable to appreciate music or visual beauty." Paint¬
ings, jewelry, sculpture, and musical instruments go back at least 35,000 years
in Europe, and probably far longer in other parts of the world where the ar¬
chaeological record is scanty. The Australian aborigines have been painting on
rocks for 50,000 years, and red ochre has been used as body makeup for at least
twice that long."

Though the exact forms of art vary widely across cultures, the activities of
making and appreciating art arc recognizable everywhere. The philosopher
Denis Dutton has identified seven universal signaturesr"

1. Expertise or virtuosity. Technical artistic skills arc cultivated, recognized,
and admired.

2. Nonutilitarian pleasure. People enjoy art for art's sake, and don’t demand
that it keep them warm or put food on the table.

3. Style. Artistic objects and performances satisfy rules of composition that
place them in a recognizable style.

4. Criticism. People make a point of judging, appreciating, and interpreting
works of art.

5. Imitation. With a few important exceptions like music and abstract paint¬
ing, works of art simulate experiences of the world.

6. Special focus. Art is set aside from ordinary lite and made a dramatic focus
of experience.

7. Imagination. Artists and their audiences entertain hypothetical worlds in
the theater of the imagination.

The psychological roots of these activities have become a topic of recent
research and debate. Some researchers, such as the scholar Ellen Dissanayake,

404 /Hot Buttons

believe that art is an evolutionary adaptation like the emotion of fear or the
ability to see in depth." Others, such as myself, believe that art (other than
narrative) is a by-product ofthree other adaptations: the hunger for status, the
aesthetic pleasure of experiencing adaptive objects and environments, and the
ability to design artifacts to achieve desired ends." On this view art is a pleas¬
ure technology, like drugs, erotica, or fine cuisine-a way to purify and con¬
centrate pleasurable stimuli and deliver them to our senses. For the discussion
in this chapter it does not matter which view is correct. Whether art is an adap¬
tation or a by-product or a mixture of the two, it is deeply rooted in our men¬
tal faculties. Here are some of those roots.

Organisms get pleasure from things that promoted the fitness of their an¬
cestors, such as the taste offood, the experience ofsex,the presence ofchildren,
and the attainment ofknow-how. Some forms ofvisual pleasure in natural en¬
vironments may promote fitness, too. As people explore an environment, they
seek patterns that help them negotiate it and take advantage of its contents. The
patterns include well-delineated regions, improbable but informative features
like parallel and perpendicular lines, and axes of symmetry and elongation.
All are used by the brain to carve the visual field into surfaces, group the sur¬
faces into objects, and organize the objects so people can recognize them the
next time they see them. Vision researchers such as David Marr, Roger Shep¬
ard, and V. S. Ramachandran have suggested that the pleasing visual motifs
used in art and decoration exaggerate these patterns, which tell the brain that
the visual system is functioning properly and analyzing the world accurately."
By the same logic, tonal and rhythmic patterns in music may tap into mecha¬
nisms used by the auditory system to organize the world of sound. 29

As the .visual system converts raw colors and forms to interpretable objects
and scenes, the aesthetic coloring of its products gets even richer. Surveys of
art, photography, and landscape design, together with experiments on peo¬
ple's visual tastes, have found recurring motifs in the sights that give people
pleasure." Some of the motifs may belong to a search image for the optimal
human habitat, a savanna: open grassland dotted with trees and bodies of
water and inhabited by animals and flowering and fruiting plants. The enjoy¬
ment of the forms of living things has been dubbed biophilia by E. O. Wilson,
and it appears to be a human universal. 31 Other patterns in a landscape may be
pleasing because they are signals of safety, such as protected but panoramic
views. Still others may be compelling because they are geographic features that
make a terrain easy to explore and remember, such as landmarks, boundaries,
nd paths. The study of evolutionary aesthetics is also documenting the fea¬
tures that make a face or body beautiful." The prized lineaments are those that
signal health, vigor, and fertility.

People are imaginative animals who constantly recombine events in their
mind’s eye. That ability is one of the engines of human intelligence, allowing

The Arts / 405

us to envision new technologies (such as snaring an animal or purifying a
plant extract) and new social skills (such as exchanging promises or finding
common enerniesj.P Narrative fiction engages this ability to explore hypo¬
thetical worlds, whether for edification-expanding the number of scenarios
whose outcomes can be predicted-or for pleasure-vicariously experiencing
love, adulation, exploration, or victory.” Hence Horace's definition of the
purpose of literature: to instruct and to delight.

In good works of art, these aesthetic elements are layered so that the whole
is more than the sum of its parts." A good landscape painting or photograph
will simultaneously evoke an inviting environment and be composed of geo¬
metric shapes with pleasing balance and contrast. A compelling story may
simulatejuicy gossip about desirable or powerful people, put us in an exciting
time or place, tickle our language instincts with well-chosen words, and teach
us something new about the entanglements of families, politics, or love. Many
kinds of art are contrived to induce a buildup and release of psychological ten¬
sion, mimicking other forms of pleasure. And a work of art is often embedded
in a social happening in which the emotions are evoked in many members of
a community at the same time, which can multiply the pleasure and grant a
sense of solidarity. Dissanayake emphasizes this spiritual part of the art expe¬
rience, which she calls "making special."36

A final bit of psychology engaged by the arts is the drive for status. One of
the items on Dutton’s list of the universal signatures of art is impracticality. But
useless things, paradoxically, can be highly useful for a certain purpose: apprais¬
ing the assets of the bearer. Thorstein Veblen first made the point in his theory
of social status." Since we cannot easily peer into the bank books or Palm Pilots
of our neighbors, a good way to size up their means is to see whether they can
afford to waste them on luxuries and leisure. Veblen wrote that the psychology
of taste is driven by three "pecuniary canons": conspicuous consumption, con¬
spicuous leisure, and conspicuous waste. They explain why status symbols are
typically objects made by arduous and specialized labor out of rare materials, or
else signs that the person is not bound to a life of manual toil, such as delicate
and restrictive clothing or expensive and time-consuming hobbies. In a beauti¬
ful convergence, the biologist Amotz Zahavi used the same principle to explain
the evolution of outlandish ornamentation in animals, such as the tail of the
peacock." Only the healthiest peacocks can afford to divert nutrients to expen¬
sive and cumbersome plumage. The peahen sizes up mates by the splendor of
their tails, and evolution selects for males who muster the best ones.

Though most aficionados are aghast at the suggestion art-e pe ia y
i arf-' atextlio k example of con picuous con urnprio . Almost by def¬
inition, art has no practical function, and as Dutton points out in his list, it
universally entails virtuosity (a sign of genetic quality, the free time to hone
skills, or both) and criticism (which sizes up the worth of the art and the

406 /Hot Buttons

artist). Through most of European history, fine art and sumptuosity went
hand in hand, as in the ostentatious decorations ofopera and theater halls, the
ornate frames around paintings, the formal dress of musicians, and the covers
and bindings of old books. Art and artists were under the patronage of aristo¬
crats or of the nouveau riche seeking instant respectability. Today, paintings,
sculptures, and manuscripts continue to be sold at exorbitant and much-
discussed prices (such as the $82.5 million paid for van Gogh's PortraitofDr.
Gachetin 1990).

In The Mating Mind, the psychologist Geoffrey Miller argues that the im¬
pulse to create art is a mating tactic: a way to impress prospective sexual and
marriage partners with the quality of one's brain and thus, indirectly, one's
genes. Artistic virtuosity, he notes, is unevenly distributed, neurally demanding,
hard to fake, and widely prized. Artists, in other words, are sexy. Nature even
gives us a precedent, th r .r f Australia and New Guinea. The males

construct elaborate nests and fastidiously decorate them with colorful objects
such as orchids, snail shells, berries, and bark. Some of them literally paint their
bowers with regurgitated fruit residue using leaves or bark as a brush. The
females appraise the bowers and mate with the creators of the most symmetri¬
cal and well-ornamented ones. Miller argues that the analogy is exact:

If you could interview a male Satin Bowerbird for Artforum magazine,
he might say something like "I find this implacable urge for self-
expression, for playing with color and form for their own sake, quite in¬
explicable. 1 cannot remember when 1 first developed this raging thirst
to present richly saturated color-fields within a monumental yet mini¬
malist stage-set, but I feel connected to something beyond myself when
1 indulge these passions. When I see a beautiful orchid high in a tree, I
simply must have it for my own. When 1 see a single shell out of place in
my creation, I must put it right_ It is a happy coincidence that fe¬

males sometimes come to my gallery openings and appreciate my work,
but it would be an insult to suggest that 1 create in order to procreate."
Fortunately, bowerbirds cannot talk, so we are free to use sexual selec¬
tion to explain their work, without them begging to diffet.'?

I am partial to a weaker version of the theory, in which one of the func¬
tions (not the only function) of creating and owning art is to impress other
people (not just prospective mates) with one's social status (not just one's ge¬
netic quality). The idea goes back to Veblen and has been amplified by the art
historian Quentin Bell and by Tom Wolfe in his fiction and nonfiction.t" Per¬
haps its greatest champion today is the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who
argues that connoisseurship of difficult and inaccessible works of culture
serves as a membership badge in society's upper strata." Remember that in all

The Arts / 407

these theories, proximate and ultimate causes may be different. As with
Miller's bowerbird, status and fitness need not enter the minds of people who
create or appreciate art; they may simply explain how an urge for self-
expression and an eye for beauty and skill evolved.

Regardless of what lies behind our instincts for art, those instincts bestow
it with a transcendence of time, place, and culture. Hume noted that "the gen¬
eral principles of taste are uniform in human nature. ... the same Homer who
pleased at Athens and Rome two thousand years ago, is still admired at Paris
and London."42 Though people can argue about whether the glass is half full
or half empty, a universal human aesthetic really can be discerned beneath the
variation across cultures. Dutton comments:

It is important to not low remark blj w I tl * rt avel out ide their
lome culture: eethoven and Shakespeare are beloved in Japan, Japa¬
nese prints are adored by Brazilians, Greek tragedy is performed world¬
wide, while, much to the regret of many local movie industries,
Hollywood films have wide cross-cultural appeal. . .. Even Indian
music ... , while it sounds initially strange to the Western ear, can be
shown to rely on rhythmic pulse and acceleration, repetition, variation
and surprise, as well as modulation and divinely sweet melody: in fact,
all the same devices found in Western music."

One can extend the range of the human aesthetic even further. The Las-
caux cave paintings, crafted in the late old Stone Age, continue to dazzle view¬
ers in the age of the Internet. The faces of Nefertiti and Botticelli's Venus could
appear on the cover of a twenty-first-century fashion magazine. The plot of the
hero myth found in countless traditional cultures was transplanted effectively
into the Star Wars saga. Western museum collectors plundered the prehistoric
treasures of Africa, Asia, and the Americas not to add to the ethnographic
record but because their patrons found the works beautiful to gaze at.

Awry demonstration of the universality of basic visual tastes came from a
1993 stunt by two artists, Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid, who used
marketing research polls to assess Americans' taste in art." They asked re¬
spondents about their preferences in color, subject matter, composition, and
style, and found considerable uniformity. People said they liked realistic,
smoothly painted landscapes in green and blue containing animals, women,
children, and heroic figures. To satisfy this consumer demand, Komar and
Melamid painted a composite of the responses: a lakeside landscape in a
nineteenth-century realist style featuring children, deer, and George Washing¬
ton. That's mildly amusing, but no one was prepared for what came next.
When the painters replicated the polling in nine other countries, including
Ukraine, Turkey, China, and Kenya, they found pretty much the same prefer-

408 /Hot Buttons

ences: an idealized landscape, like the ones on calendars, and only minor sub¬
stitutions from the American standard (hippos instead of deer, for example).
What is even more interesting is that these McPaintings exemplify the kind of
landscape that had been characterized as optimal for our species by re¬
searchers in evolutionary aesthetics.P

The art critic Arthur Danto had a different explanation: Western calen¬
dars are marketed all over the world, just like the rest ofWestem culture and
art." To many intellectuals, the globalization of Western styles is proof that
tastes in art are arbitrary. People show similar aesthetic preferences, they
claim, only because Western ideals have been exported t§ the world by impe¬
rialism, global business, and electronic media. There riiay be some truth to
this, and for many people it is the morally correct position because it implies
that there is nothing superior about Western culture or inferior about the in¬
digenous ones it is replacing.

But there is another side to the story. Western societies are good at pro¬
viding things that people want: clean water, effective medicine, varied and
abundant food, rapid transportation and communication. They perfect these
goods and services not from benevolence but from self-interest, namely the
profits to be made in selling them. Perhaps the aesthetics industry also per¬
fected ways of giving people what they like-in this case, art forms that appeal
to basic human tastes, such as calendar landscapes, popular songs, and Holly¬
wood romances and adventures. So even if an art form matured in the West, it
may be not an arbitrary practice spread by a powerful navy but a successful
product that engages a universal human aesthetic. This all sounds very
parochial and Eurocentric, and I wouldn't push it too far, but it must have an
element of truth: if there is a profit to be made in appealing to global human
tastes, it would be surprising if entrepreneurs hadn't taken advantage of it.
And it isn't as Eurocentric as one might think. Western culture, like Western
technology and Western cuisine, is voraciously eclectic, appropriating any
trick that pleases people from any culture it encounters. An example is one of
America's most important culture exports, popular music. Ragtime, jazz, rock,
blues, soul, and rap grew out of African American musical forms, which orig¬
inally incorporated African rhythms and vocal styles.

SO what happened in 1910 that supposedly changed human nature? The
event that stood out in Virginia Woolfs recollection was a London exhibition
of the paintings of the post-impressionists, including Cezanne, Gauguin, Pi¬
casso, and van Gogh. It was an unveiling of the movement called m rnisra,
and when Woolf wrote her declaration in the 1920s,the movement was taking
over the arts.

Modernism certainly proceeded asifhuman nature had changed. All the
tricks that artists had used for millennia to please the human palate were cast

The Arts / 409

aside. In painting, realistic depiction gave way to freakish distortions of shape
and color and then to abstract grids, shapes, dribbles, splashes, and, in the
$200,000 painting featured in the recent comedy Art, a blank white canvas. In
literature, omniscient narration, structured plots, the orderly introduction of
characters, and general readability were replaced by a stream of consciousness,
events presented out of order, baffling characters and causal sequences, sub¬
jective and disjointed narration, and difficult prose. In poetry, the use of
rhyme, meter, verse structure, and clarity were frequently abandoned. In
music, conventional rhythm and melody were set aside in favor of atonal, se¬
rial, dissonant, and twelve-tone compositions. In architecture, ornamenta¬
tion, human scale, garden space, and traditional craftsmanship went out the
window (or would have if the windows could have been opened), and build¬
ings were "machines for living" made of industrial materials in boxy shapes.
Modernist architecture culminated both in the glass-and-steel towers of
multinational corporations and in the dreary high-rises of American housing
projects, postwar British council flats, and Soviet apartment blocks.

Why did the artistic elite spearhead a movement that called for such
masochism? In part it was touted as a reaction to the complacency of the Vic¬
torian era and to the naive bourgeois belief in certain knowledge, inevitable
progress, and the justice of the social order. Weird and disturbing art was sup¬
posed to remind people that the world was a weird and disturbing place. And
science, supposedly, was offering the same message. According to the version
that trickled into the humanities, Freud showed that behavior springs from
unconscious and irrational impulses, Einstein showed that time and space can
be defined only relative to an observer, and Heisenberg showed that the posi¬
tion and momentum of an object were inherently uncertain because they were
affected by the act of observation. Much later, this embroidery of physics in¬
spired the famous hoax in which the physicist Alan Sokal successfully pub¬
lished a paper filled with gibberish in the journal Social Texi.t'

But modernism wanted to do more than just afflict the comfortable. Its
glorification of pure form and its disdain for easy beauty and bourgeois plea¬
sure had an explicit rationale and a political and spiritual agenda. In a review
of a book defending the mission of modernism, the critic Frederick Turner ex¬
plains them:

The great project of modem art was to diagnose, and cure, the sickness
unto death of modem humankind_[Its artistic mission] is to iden¬

tify and strip away the false sense of routine experience and interpretive
framing provided by conformist mass commercial society, and to make
us experience nakedly and anew the immediacy of reality through our
peeled and rejuvenated senses. This therapeutic work is also a spiritual

410 / Hot Buttons

mission, in that a community of such transformed human beings
would, in theory, be able to construct a better kind of society. The ene¬
mies of the process are cooptation, commercial exploitation and repro¬
duction, and kitsch_Fresf raw experience-to which artists have an

unmediated and childlike access-is routinized, compartmentalized,
and dulled into insensibility by society,"

Beginning in the 1970s, the mission of modernism was extended by the set
of styles and philosophies calle modernism. Postmodernism was even
more aggressively relativistic, insisting that there are many perspectives on the
world, none of them privileged. It denied even more vehemently the possibil¬
ity of meaning, knowledge, progress, and shared cultural values. It was more
Marxist and far more paranoid, asserting that claims to truth and progress
were tactics of political domination which privileged the interests of straight
white males. According to the doctrine, mass-produced commodities and
media-disseminated images and stories were designed to make authentic ex¬
perience impossible.

h oal of po tmodernist art is to help u break out of this ri on. The
artists try to preempt cultural motifs and representational techniques by tak¬
ing capitalist icons (such as ads, package designs, and pinup photos) and de¬
facing them, exaggerating them, or presenting them in odd contexts. The
earliest examples were Andy Warhol’s paintings of soup can labels and his
repetitive false-color images of Marilyn Monroe. More recent ones include the
Whitney Museum's "Black Male" exhibit described in Chapter 12 and Cindy
Sherman's photographs ofgrotesquely assembled bi-gendered mannequins. (I
saw them as part of an MIT exhibit that explored "the female body as a site of
conflicting desires, and femininity as a taut web of social expectations, histor¬
ical assumptions, and ideological constructions:') In postmodernist literature,
authors comment on what they are writing v$lile they are writing it. In post¬
modernist architecture, materials and details from different kinds ofbuildings
and historical periods are thrown together in incongruous ways, such as an
awning made of chain-link fencing in a fancy shopping mall or Corinthian
columns holding up nothing on the top of a sleek skyscraper. Postmodernist
films contain sly references to the filmmaking process or to earlier films. In all
these forms, irony, If-r er ntial allu ion , and the pret n eofnottakin the
r eriou Iy are meant to draw attention to the representations themselves,
which (according to the doctrine) we re ordinarily in danger of mistaking or
r ality.

once we recognize what modernism and postmodernism have done to
the elite arts and humanities, the reasons for their decline and fall become all

The Arts I 411

too obvious. The movements are based on a false theory of human psychology,
the Blank Slate. They fail to apply their most vaunted ability-stripping away
pretense-to themselves. And they take all the fun out of art!

Modernism and postmodernism cling te a theory of perception that was
rejectedlong ago: that the sense organs present the brain with a tableau of raw
colors and sounds and that everything else in perceptual experience is a
learned social construction. Aswe saw in preceding chapters, the visual system
of the brain comprises some fifty regions that take raw pixels and effortlessly
organize them into surfaces, colors, motions, and three-dimensional objects.
We can no more turn the system off and get immediate access to pure sensory
experience than we can override our stomachs and tell them when to release
their digestive enzymes. The visual system, moreover, does not drug us into a
hallucinatory fantasy disconnected from the real world. It evolved to feed us
information about the consequential things out there, like rocks, cliffs, ani¬
mals, and other people and their intentions.

Nor does innate organization stop at apprehending the physical structure
of the world . It also colors our visual experience with universal emotions and
aesthetic pleasures. Young children prefer calendar landscapes to pictures of
deserts and forests, and babies as young as three months old gaze longer at a
pretty face than at a plain one.'? Babies prefer consonant musical intervals
over dissonant ones, and two-year-olds embark on a lifetime of composing
and appreciating narrative fiction when they engage in pretend play.50

When we perceive the products of other people's behavior, we evaluate
them through our intuitive psychology, our theory of mind. We do not take a
stretch oflanguage or an artifact like a product or work of art at face value, but
try to guess why the producers came out with them and what effect they hope
to have on us (as we saw in Chapter 12). Of course, people can be taken in by
a clever liar, but { fhey are not tra ped in a false world of words and images and
in need of rescue b po tm derni i

Modernist and postmodernist artists and critics fail to acknowledge an¬
other feature of human nature that drives the arts: the hunger for status, espe¬
cially their own hunger for status. As we saw, the psychology of art is entangled
with the psychology of esteem, with its appreciation of the rare, the sumptu¬
ous, the virtuosic, and the dazzling. The problem is that whenever people seek
rare things, entrepreneurs make them less rare, and whenever a dazzling per¬
formance is imitated, it can become commonplace. The result is the perennial
turnover of styles in the arts. The psychologist Colin Martindale has docu¬
mented that every art form increases in complexity, ornamentation, and emo¬
tional charge until the evocative potential of the style is fully exploited."
Attention then turns to the style itself, at which point the style gives way to a
new one. Martindale attributes this cycle to habituation on the part of the au¬
dience, but it also comes from the desire for attention on the part of the artists.

412/ Hot Buttons

In twentieth-century art, the search for the new new thing became des¬
perate because of the economies of mass production and the affluence of the
middle class. As cameras, art reproductions, radios, records, magazines,
movies, and paperbacks became affordable, ordinary people could buy art by
the carload. It is hard to distinguish oneself as a good artist or discerning con¬
noisseur if people are up to their ears in the stuff, much of it of reasonable
artistic merit. The problem for artists is not that popular culture is so bad but
that it is so good, at least some of the time. Art could no longer confer prestige
by the rarity or excellence of the works themselves, so it had to confer it by the
rarity of the powers of appreciation. As Bourdieu points out, only a special
elite of initiates could get the point of the new works of art. Anc^With beauti-
fulthing ping out a printing presse and record plants di in tive works
not be beautiful. Indeed, they had better not be, because now any schmo
could have beautiful things.

One result is that modernist art stopped trying to appeal to the senses.
On the contrary, it disdained beauty as saccharine and lightweight. 52 In his
1913 book Art, the critic Clive Bell (Virginia Woolfs brother-in-law and
Quentin's father) argued that beauty had no place in good art because it was
rooted in crass experiences." People use beautiful in phrases like "beautiful
huntin' and shootin’," he wrote, or worse, to refer to beautiful women. Bell as¬
similated the behaviorist psychology of his day and argued that ordinary peo¬
ple come to enjoy art by a process of Pavlovian conditioning. They appreciate
a painting only if it depicts a beautiful woman, music only if it evokes "emo¬
tions similar to those provoked by young ladies in musical farces: 1 and poetry
only if it arouses feelings like the ones once felt for the vicar's daughter.
Thirty-five years later, the abstract painter Barnett Newman approvingly de¬
clared that the impulse of modern art was "the desire to destroy beauty?"
Postmodernists were even more dismissive. Beauty, they said, consists of arbi¬
trary standards dictated by an elite. It enslaves women by forcing them to
conform to unrealistic ideals, and it panders to market-oriented art collec¬
tors. "

To be fair, modernism comprises many styles and artists, and not all of
them rejected beauty and other human sensibilities. At its best, modernist de¬
sign perfected a visual elegance and an aesthetic of orm-following-functi n
that were welcome alternatives to Victorian bric-a-brac and ostentatious dis¬
plays of wealth. The art movements opened up new stylistic possibilities, in¬
cluding motifs from Africa and Oceania. The fiction and poetry offered
invigorating intellectual workout, and c unt r tim nt roman ici m

that saw art as a spontaneous overflow of the artist's personality and emotion.
The problem with modernism was that its philosophy did not acknowledge
the ways in which it was appealing to human pleasure. As its denial of beauty
became an orthodoxy, and as its aesthetic successes were appropriated into

The Arts / 413

commercial culture (such as minimalism in graphic design), modernism left
nowhere for artists to go.

Quentin Bell suggested that when the variations within a genre are ex¬
hausted, people avail themselves of a different canon of status, which he added
to Veblen's list. In "conspicuous outrage," bad boys (and girls) flaunt their abil¬
ity to get away with shocking the bourgeoisie.56 The never-ending campaign
by postmodernist artists to attract the attention of a jaded public progressed
from puzzling audiences to doing everything they could to offend them.
Everyone has heard of the notorious cases: Robert Mapplethorpe's photo¬
graphs of sadomasochistic acts, Andres Serrano's Piss Christ (a photo of a cru¬
cifix in a jar of the artist's urine), Chris Ofili's painting of the Virgin Mary
smeared in elephant dung, and the nine-hour performance piece "Flag Fuck
(w/Beef) #17B,"in which Ivan Hubiak danced on stage wearing an American
flag as a diaper while draping himself with raw meat. Actually, this last one
never happened; it was invented by writers for the satirical newspaper The
Onion in an article entitled "Performance Artist Shocks U.S. Out of Apathetic
Slumber."? But I bet I had you fooled.

Another result is that elite art could no longer be appreciated without a
support team of critics and theoreticians. They did not simply evaluate and in¬
terpret art, like movie critics or book reviewers, but supplied the art with its
rationale. Tom Wolfe wrote ThePaintedWord after reading an art review in the
New York Times that criticized realist painting because it lacked "something
crucial," namely, "a persuasive theory." Wolfe explains:

Then and there I experienced a flash known as the Aha! phenomenon,
and the buried life of contemporary art was revealed to me for the first
time.... All these years I, like so many others, had stood in front of a
thousand, two thousand, God-knows-how-many thousand Pollocks, de
Koonings, Newmans, Nolands, Rothkos, Rauschenbergs, ludds, Iohnses,
Olitskis, Fouises, Stills, Franz Klines, Frankenthalers, Kellys, and Frank
Stellas, now squinting, now popping the eye sockets open, now drawing
back, now moving closer-waiting, waiting, forever waiting for...
it . . . for it to come into focus, namely, the visual reward (for so much
effort) which must be there, which everyone (tout le monde) knew to be
there-waiting for something to radiate directly from the paintings on
these invariably pure white walls, in this room, in this moment, into my
own optic chiasma. All these years, in short, I had assumed that in art, if
nowhere else, seeing is believing. Well-how very shortsighted! Now, at
last, on April 28, 1974,Icould see.Ihad gotten it backward all along. Not
"seeing isbelieving;' you ninny, but "believing is seeing," for

he orne ompl tely lit rary: the paintings and other work exist only to
tllustrate the text?

414 / Hot Buttons

Once again, postmodernism took this extreme to an even greater extreme
in which the theory upstaged the subject matter and became a genre of per¬
formance art in itself. Postmodernist scholars, taking off from the critical the¬
orists Theodor Adorno and Michel Foucault, distrust the demand for
"linguistic transparency" because it hobbles the ability "to think the world
more radically" and puts a text in danger of being turned into a mass-market
commodity. 1 ? This attitude has made them regular winners of the annual Bad
Writing Contest, which "celebrates the most stylistically lamentable passages
found in scholarly books and articles."®In 1998, first prize went to the lauded
professor of rhetoric at Berkeley, Judith Butler, for the following sentence:

The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to
structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of
hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, conver¬
gence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the
thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian
theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in
which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugu¬
rate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contin¬
gent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.

Dutton, whose journal Philosophy and Literature sponsors the contest, assures
us that this is not a satire. The rules of the contest forbid it: "Deliberate parody
cannot be allowed in a field where unintended self-parody is so widespread."

A final blind spot to human nature is the failure of contemporary artists
and theorists to deconstruct their own moral pretensions. Artists and critics
have long believed that an appreciation of elite art is ennobling and have spo¬
ken of cultural philistines in tones ordinarily reserved for child molesters (as
we see in the two meanings of the word barbarian). The affectation of social
reform that surrounds modernism and postmodernism is part of this tradi¬
tion.

Though moral sophistication requires an appreciation of history and cul¬
tural diversity, there is no reason to think that the elite arts are a particularly
good way to instill it compared with middlebrow realistic fiction or traditional
education. The plain fact is that there are no obvious moral consequences to
how people entertain themselves in their leisure timei The conviction that
artists and connoisseurs are morally advanced is a cognitive illusion, arising
from the fact that our circuitry for morality is cross-wired with our circuitry
for status (see Chapter 15). As the critic George Steiner has pointed out, "We
know that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play
Bach and Schubert, and go to his day's work at Auschwitz in the morning."61
Conversely there must be many unlettered people who give blood, risk their

The Arts / 415

lives as volunteer firefighters, or adopt handicapped children, but whose opin¬
ion of modern art is "My four-year-old daughter could have done that."

The moral and political track record of modernist artists is nothing to be
proud of. Some were despicable in the conduct of their personal lives, and
many embraced fascism or Stalinism. The modernist composer Karlheinz
Stockhausen described the September 11,2001, terrorist attacks as "the great¬
est work of art imaginable for the whole cosmos" and added, enviously, that
"artists, too, sometimes go beyond the limits of what is feasible and conceiv¬
able, so that we wake up, so that we open ourselves to another world." 62Nor is
the theory of postmodernism especially progressive. A denial of objective real-
■ty is no friend to moral progress, because it prevents one from saying, for ex¬
ample, that slavery or the Holocaust really took place. And as Adam Gopnik
has pointed out, the political messages of most postmodernist pieces are ut¬
terly banal, like "racism is bad.” But they are stated so obliquely that viewers are
made to feel morally superior for being able to figure them out.

As for sneering at the bourgeoisie, it is a sophomoric grab at status with no
claim to moral or political virtue. The fact is that the values of the middle
lass-personal responsibility, devotion to family and neighborhood, avoid¬
ance of macho violence, respect for liberal democracy-are good things, not
bad things. Most of the world wants to join the bourgeoisie, and most artists
are members in good standing who adopted a few bohemian affectations.
Given the history of the twentieth century, the reluctance of the bourgeoisie to
join mass utopian uprisings can hardly be held against them. And if they want
to hang a painting of a red barn or a weeping clown above their couch, it's
none of our damn business.

The dominant theories of elite art and criticism in the twentieth century
grew out of a militant denial of human nature. One legacy is ugly, baffling, and
insulting art. The other is pretentious and unintelligible scholarship. And
they're surprised that people are staying away in droves?

A revolt has begun. Museum-goers have become bored with the
umpteenth exhibit on the female body featuring dismembered torsos or hun¬
dreds of pounds of lard chewed up and spat out by the artist. 63 Graduate stu¬
dents in the humanities are grumbling in emails and conference hallways
about being locked out of the job market unless they write in gibberish while
randomly dropping the names of authorities like Foucault and Butler. Maver¬
ick scholars are doffing the blinders that prevented them from looking at ex¬
citing developments in the sciences of human nature. And younger artists are
wondering how the art world got itself into the bizarre place in which beauty
is a dirty word.

These currents of discontent are coming together in a new philosophy of
the arts, one that is consilient with the sciences and respectful of the minds

416/ Hot Buttons

and senses of human beings. It is taking shape both in the community of
artists and in the community of critics and scholars.

In the year 2000, the composer Stefania de Kenessey puckishly an¬
nounced a new "movement" in the arts erriere u which celebrates
beauty, technique, and narrative." If that ounds too innocuous to count as a
movement, consider the response of the director of the Whitney, the shrine of
the dismembered-torso establishment, who called the members of the move¬
ment “a bunch of crypto-Nazi conservative bullshitters.?" Ideas similar to
Derriere Guard's have sprung up in movements called the Radical Center,
Natural Classicism, the New Formalism, the New Narrativism, Stuckism, the
Return of Beauty, and No Mo Po MO.66 The movements combine high and
low culture and are opposed equally to the postmodernist left, with its disdain
for beauty and artistry, and to the cultural right, with its narrow canons of
"great works" and fire-and-brimstone sermons on the decline of civilization.
It includes classically trained musicians who mix classical and popular com¬
positions, realist painters and sculptors, verse poets, journalistic novelists, and
dance directors and performance artists who use rhythm and melody in their
work.

Within the academy, a growing number of mavericks are looking to evo¬
lutionary psychology and cognitive science in an effort to reestablish human
nature at the center of any understanding of the arts. They include Brian Boyd,
Joseph Carroll, Denis Dutton, Nancy Easterlin, David Evans, Jonathan
Gottschall, Paul Hernadi, Patrick Hogan, Elaine Scarry, Wendy Steiner, Robert
Storey, Frederick Turner, and Mark Turner." A good grasp of how the mind
works is indispensable to the arts and humanities for at least two reasons.

One is that the real medium of artists, whatever their genre, is human men¬
tal representations. Oil paint, moving limbs, and printed words cannot pene¬
trate the brain directly. They trigger a cascade of neural events that begin with
the sense organs and culminate in thoughts, emotions, and memories. Cogni¬
tive science and cognitive neuroscience, which map out the cascade, offer a
wealth of information to anyone who wants to understand how artists achieve
their effects. Vision research can illuminate painting and sculpture.f Psycho¬
acoustics and linguistics can enrich the study of music/" Linguistics can give
insight on poetry, metaphor, and literary style,"? Mental imagery research helps
to explain the techniques of narrative prose." The theory of mind (intuitive
psychology) can shed light on our ability to entertain fictional worlds." The
study of visual attention and short-term memory can help explain the experi¬
ence of cinema." And evolutionary aesthetics can help explain the feelings of
beauty and pleasure that can accompany all of these acts of perception."

Ironically, the early modernist painters were avid consumers of percep¬
tion research. It may have been introduced to them by Gertrude Stein, who
studied psychology with William James at Harvard and conducted research on

The Arts/417

visual attention under his supervision." The Bauhaus designers and artists,
too, were appreciators of perceptual psychology, particularly the contempo¬
rary Gestalt school." But the consilience was lost as the two cultures drifted
apart, and only recently have they tyegun to come back together. I predict that
the application of cognitive science and evolutionary psychology to the arts
will become a growth area in criticism and scholarship.

The other point of contact may be more important still. Ultimately what
draws us to a work of art is not just the sensory experience of the medium but
its emotional content and insight into the human condition. And these tap
into the timeless tragedies of our biological predicament: our mortality, our
finite knowledge and wisdom, the differences among us, and our conflicts of
interest with friends, neighbors, relatives, and lovers. All are topics of the sci¬
ences of human nature.

The idea that art should reflect the perennial and universal qualities of the
human species is not new. Samuel Johnson, in the preface to his edition of
Shakespeare's plays, comments on the lasting appeal ofthat great intuitive psy¬
chologist:

Nothing can please many, and please long, but just representations of
general nature. Particular manners can be known to few, and therefore
few only can judge how nearly they are copied. The irregular combina¬
tions of fanciful invention may delight a-while, by that novelty of which
the common satiety of life sends us all in quest; but the pleasures of sud¬
den wonder are soon exhausted, and the mind can only repose on the
stability of truth.

Today we may be seeing a new convergence of explorations of the human
condition by artists and scientists-not because scientists are trying to take
over the humanities, but because artists and humanists are beginning to look
to the sciences, or at least to the scientific mindset that sees us as a species with
a complex psychological endowment. In explaining this connection I cannot
hope to compete with the words of the artists themselves, and I will conclude
with the overtures of three fine novelists.

Iris Murdoch, haunted by the origins of the moral sense, comments on its
endurance in fiction:

We make, in many respects though not in all, the same kinds of moral
judgments as the Greeks did, and we recognize good or decent people in
times and literatures remote from our own. Patroclus, Antigone,
Cordelia, Mr. Knightley, Alyosha Patroclus' invariable kindness.
Cordelia's truthfulness. Alyosha telling his father not to be afraid of hell.

It is just as important that Patroclus should be kind to the captive

418 / Hot Buttons

women as that Emma should be kind to Miss Bates, and we feel this im¬
portance in an immediate and natural way in both cases in spite of the
fact that nearly three thousand years divide the writers. And this, when
one reflects on it, is a remarkable testimony to the existence of a single
durable human nature. 77

A. S. Byatt, asked by the editors of the New York. Times Magazine for the
best narrative ofthe millennium, picked the story of Scheherazade:

The stories in “The Thousand and One Nights" ... are stories about
storytelling without ever ceasing to be stories about love and life and
death and money and food and other human necessities. Narration is as
much apartofhuman nature as breath and the circulation ofthe blood.
Modernist literature tried to do away with storytelling, which it thought
vulgar, replacing it with flashbacks, epiphanies, streams of conscious¬
ness. But storytelling is intrinsic to biological time, which we cannot es¬
cape. Life, Pascal said, is like living in a prison from which every day
fellow prisoners are taken away to be executed. We are all, like
Scheherazade, under sentences of death, and we all think of our lives as
narratives, with beginnings, middles, and ends."

John Updike, also asked for reflections at the turn of the millennium,
commented on the future of his own profession. “A writer of fiction, a profes-
sionalliar, is paradoxically obsessed with what is true:' he wrote, and "the unit
of truth, at least for a fiction writer, is the human animal, belonging to the
species Homo sapiens, unchanged for at.least 100,000 years:'

Evolution moves more slowly than history, and much slower than the
technology of recent centuries; surely sociobiology, surprisingly ma¬
ligned in some scientific quarters, performs a useful service in investi¬
gating what traits are innate and which are acquired. What kind of
cultural software can our evolved hard-wiring support? Fiction, in its
groping way, is.drawn to those moments of discomfort when society
asks inore than its individual members can, or wish to, provide. Ordi¬
nary people experiencing friction on the page is what warms our hands
and hearts as we write ....

To be human is to be in the tense condition of a death-foreseeing,
consciously libidinous animal. No other earthly creature suffers such a
capacity for thought, such a complexity of envisioned but frustrated
possibilities, such a troubling ability to question the tribal and biologi¬
cal imperatives.

So conflicted and ingenious a creature makes an endlessly interesting

The Arts 1419

focus for the meditations of fiction. It seems to me true that Homo sapi¬
ens w ill never settle into any utopia so complacently as to relax all its
conflicts and erase all its perversity-breeding neediness."

Literature has three voices, wrote the scholar Robert Storey: those of the
author, the audience, and the species." These novelists are reminding us ofthe
voice ofthe species, an essential constituent of all the arts, and a fitting theme
with which to wrap up my own story.

420 /Hot Buttons

THE VOICE OF

THE SPECIES

T he Blank Slate was an attractive vision. It promised to make racism,
sexism, and class prejudice factually untenable. It appeared to be abul-
wark against the kind of thinking that led to ethnic genocide. It aimed
to prevent people from slipping into a premature fatalism about preventable
social ills. It put a spotlight on the treatment of children, indigenous peoples,
and the underclass. The Blank Slate thus became part of a secular faith and ap¬
peared to constitute the common decency of our age.

But the Blank Slate had, and has, a dark side. The vacuum that it posited
in human nature was eagerly filled by totalitarian regimes, and it did nothing
to prevent their genocides. It perverts education, childrearing, and the arts
into forms of social engineering. It torments mothers who work outside the
home and parents whose children did not turn out as they would have liked. It
threatens to outlaw biomedical research that could alleviate human suffering.
Its corollary, the Noble Savage, invites contempt for the principles of democ¬
racy and of“a government of laws and not of men:' It blinds us to our cogni¬
tive and moral shortcomings. And in matters of policy it has elevated sappy
dogmas above the search for workable solutions.

The Blank Slate is not some ideal that we should all hope and pray is true.
No, it is an anti-life, anti-human theoretical abstraction that denies our com¬
mon humanity, our inherent interests, and our individual preferences.
Though it has pretensions of celebrating our potential, it does the opposite,'
because our potential comes from the combinatorial interplay of wonderfully
complex faculties, not from the passive blankness of an empty tablet.

Regardless of its good and bad effects, the Blank Slate is an empirical hy¬
pothesis about the functioning ofthe brain and must be evaluated in terms of
whether or not it is true. The modern sciences of mind, brain, genes, and evo¬
lution are increasingly showing that it is not true. The result is a rearguard ef¬
fort to salvage the Blank Slate by disfiguring science and intellectual life:

The Voice of the Species / 421

denying the possibility of objectivity and truth, dumbing down issues into di¬
chotomies' replacing facts and logic with political posturing.

The Blank Slate became so entrenched in intellectual life that the prospect,
of doing without it can be deeply unsettling. In topics from childrearing to
sexuality, from natural foods to violence, ideas that seemed immoral even to
question turn out to be not just questionable but probably wrong. Even peo¬
ple with no ideological ax to grind can feel a sense of vertigo when they learn
of such taboos being broken: ”0 brave new world that has such people in it!"
Is science leading to a place where prejudice is all right, where children may be
neglected, where Machiavellianism is accepted, where inequality and violence
are met with resignation, where people are treated like machines?

Not at all! By unhandcuffing widely shared values from moribund factual
dogmas, the rationale for those values can only become clearer. We understand
why we condemn prejudice, cruelty to children, and violence against women,
and can focus our efforts on how to implement the goals we value most. We
thereby protect those goals against the upheavals of factual understanding that
science perennially delivers.

Abandoning the Blank Slate, in any case, is not as radical as it might first
appear. True, it is a revolution in many sectors of modern intellectual life. But
except for a few intellectuals who have let their theories get the better of them,
it is not a revolution in the world views of most people. I suspect that few peo¬
ple really believe, deep down, that boys and girls are interchangeable, that all
differences in intelligence come from the environment, that parents can mi¬
cromanage the personalities of their children, that humans are born free of
selfish tendencies, or that appealing stories, melodies, and faces are arbitrary
social constructions. Margaret Mead, an icon of twentieth-century egalitari¬
anism, told her daughter that she credited her own intellectual talent to her
genes, and I can confirm that such split personalities are common among aca¬
demics.' Scholars who publicly deny that intelligence is a meaningful concept
treat it as anything but meaningless in their professional lives. Those who
argue that gender differences are a reversible social construction do not treat
them that way in their advice to their daughters, their dealings with the oppo¬
site sex, and their unguarded gossip, humor, and reflections on their lives.

Acknowledging human nature does not mean overturning our personal
world views, and I would have nothing to suggest as a replacement if it did. It
means only taking intellectual life out of its parallel universe and reuniting it
with science and, when it is borne out by science, with common sense. The al¬
ternative is to make intellectual life increasingly irrelevant to human affairs, to
turn intellectuals into hypocrites, and to turn everyone else into anti¬
intellectuals.

Scientists and public intellectuals are not the only people who have pon¬
dered how the mind works. We are all psychologists, and some people, without

422 / The Voice of the Species

the benefit of credentials, are great psychologists. Among them are poets and
novelists, whose business, as we saw in the preceding chapter, is to create "just
representations of general nature:' Paradoxically, in today's intellectual cli¬
mate novelists may have a clearer mandate than scientists to speak the truth
about human nature. Sophisticated people sneer at feel-good comedies and
saccharine romances in which all loose ends are tied and everyone lives hap¬
pily ever after. Lifeis nothing like that, we note, and we look to the arts for ed¬
ification about the painful dilemmas of the human condition.

Yetwhen it comes to the science of human beings, this same audience says:
Give us schmaltz! "Pessimism" is considered a legitimate criticism of observa¬
tions of human nature, and people expect theories to be a source of sentimen¬
tal uplift. "Shakespeare had no conscience; neither do I:' said George Bernard
Shaw. This was not a confession of psychopathy but an affirmation of a good
playwright’s obligation to take every character's point of view seriously. Scien¬
tists ofhuman behavior have the same obligation, and it does not require them
,to turn off their consciences in the spheres in which they must be exercised.

Poets and novelists have made many of the points of this book with
greater wit and power than any academic scribbler could hope to do. They
allow me to conclude the book by revisiting some of its main themes without
merely repeating them. What follows are five vignettes from literature that
capture, for me, some of the morals of the sciences ofhuman nature. They un¬
derscore that the discoveries of those sciences should be faced 'not with fear
and loathing but with the balance and discernment we use when we reflect on
human nature in the rest of our lives.

The Brain-is wider than the Sky-
For-put them side by side-
The one the other will contain
With ease-and you-beside- '

The Brain is deeper than the sea-
For-hold them-Blue to Blue-
The one the other will absorb—
AsSponges-Buckets-do-

The Brain is just the weight of God-
For-Heft them-Pound for Pound-
And they will differ-s-ifthey do-
As Syllable from Sound-

The first two verses of Emily Dickinson's "The Brain Is Wider Than the
Sky" express the grandeur in the view of the mind as consisting in the activity
ofthe brain.' Here and in her otherpoems, Dickinson refers to "the brain:'not

The Voice of the Species / 423

"the soul" or even "the mind;' as if to remind her readers that the seat of our
thought and experience is a hunk of matter. Yes, science is, in a sense, "reduc¬
ing" us to the physiological processes of a not-very-attractive three-pound
organ. But what an organ! In its staggering complexity, its explosive combina¬
torial computation, and its limitless ability to imagine real and hypothetical
worlds, the brain, truly, is wider than the sky. The poem itself proves it. Simply
to understand the comparison in each verse, the brain of the reader must con¬
tain the sky and absorb the sea and visualize each one at the same scale as the
brain itself.

The enigmatic final verse, with its startling image of God and the brain
being hefted like cabbages, has puzzled readers since the poem was published.
Some read it as creationism (God made the brain), others as atheism (the
brain thought up God). The simile with phonology-sound is a seamless con¬
tinuum, a syllable is a demarcated unit of it-suggests a kind of pantheism:
God is everywhere and nowhere, and every brain incarnates a finite measure
of divinity. The loophole “if they do” suggests mysticism-the brain and God
may somehow be the same thing-and, ofcourse, agnosticism. The ambiguity
is surely intentional, and I doubt that anyone could defend a single interpreta¬
tion as the correct one.

I like to read the verse as suggesting that the mind, in contemplating its
place in the cosmos, at some point reaches its own limitations and runs into
puzzles that seem to belong in a separate, divine realm. Free will and subjective
experience, for example, are alien to our concept of causation and feel like a di¬
vine spark inside us. Morality and meaning seem to inhere in a reality that ex¬
ists independent of our judgments. But that separateness may be the illusion
of a brain that makes it impossible for us not to think they are separate from
us. Ultimately we have no way of knowing, because we are our brains and have
no way of stepping outside them to check. But if we are thereby trapped, it is a
trap that we can hardly bemoan, for it is wider than the sky, deeper than the
sea, and perhaps as weighty as God.

kurt vonnegut’s story "Harrison Bergeron" is as transparent as Dickin¬
son's poem is cryptic. Here is how it begins:

The year was 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren't only
equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. No¬
body was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than
anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All
this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the
Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United
States Handicapper General.'

424 / The Voice of the Species

The Handicapper General enforces equality by neutralizing any inherited
(hence undeserved) asset. Intelligent people have to wear radios in their ears
tuned to a government transmitter that sends out a sharp noise every twenty
seconds (such as the sound of a milk bottle struck with a ball-peen hammer)
to prevent them from taking unfair advantage of their brains. Ballerinas are
laden with bags of birdshot and their faces are hidden by masks so that no one
can feel bad at seeing someone prettier or more graceful than they. Newscast¬
ers are selected for their speech impediments. The hero of the story is a multi¬
ply gifted teenager forced to wear headphones, thick wavy glasses, three
hundred pounds of scrap iron, and black caps on half his teeth. The story is
about his ill-fated rebellion.

Subtle it is not, but "Harrison Bergeron" is a witty reductio of an all too
common fallacy. The ideal of political equality is not a guarantee that people
are innately indistinguishable. It is a policy to treat people in certain spheres
(justice, education, politics) on the basis of their individual merits rather than
the statistics of any group they belong to. And it is a policy to recognize inalien¬
able rights in all people by virtue of the fact that they are sentient human beings.
Policies that insist that people be identical in their outcomes must impose costs
on humans who, like all living things, vary in their biological endowment. Since
talents by definition are rare, and can be fully realized only in rare circum¬
stances, it is easier to achieve forced equality by lowering the top (and thereby
depriving everyone of the fruits of people's talents) than by raising the bottom.
In Vonnegut's America of 2081 the desire for equality ofoutcome is played out
as a farce, but in the twentieth century it frequently led to real crimes against
humanity, and in our own society the entire issue is often a taboo.

Vonnegut is a beloved author who has never been called a racist, sexist,
elitist, or Social Darwinist. Imagine the reaction if he had stated his message in
declarative sentences rather than in a satirical story. Every generation has its
designated jokers, from Shakespearean fools to Lenny Bruce, who give voice to
truths that are unmentionable in polite society. Today part-time humorists
like Vonnegut, and full-time ones like Richard Pryor, Dave Barry, and the writ¬
ers of The Onion , are continuing that tradition.

VONNEGUT’S DYSTOPIAN FANTASY was played out as a story-length farce,
but the most famous of such fantasies was played out as a novel-length night¬
mare. George Orwell's 1984 is a vivid depiction of what life would look like
if the repressive strands of society and government were extrapolated into
the future. In the half-century since the novel was published, many develop¬
ments have been condemned because of their associations to Orwell's world:
government euphemism, national identity cards, surveillance cameras, per¬
sonal.data on the Internet, and even, in the first television commercial for the

The Voice of the Species / 425

Macintosh computer, the IBM PC. No other work of fiction has had such an
impact on people's opinions ofreal-world issues.

Nineteen Eighty-four was unforgettable literature, not just a political
screed, because of the way Orwell thought through the details of how his soci¬
ety would work. Every component of the nightmare interlocked with the oth¬
ers to form a rich and credible whole: the omnipresent government, the
eternal war with shifting enemies, the totalitarian control of the media and
private life, the Newspeak language, the constant threat of personal betrayal.

Less widely known is that the regime had a well-articulated philosophy. It
is explained to Winston Smith in the harrowing sequence in which he is
strapped to a table and alternately tortured and lectured by the government
agent O’Brien. The philosophy of the regime is thoroughly postmodernist,
O’Brien explains (without, of course, using the word). When Winston objects
that the Party cannot realize its slogan, "Who controls the past controls the fu¬
ture; who controls the present controls the past;' O'Brien replies:

You believe that reality is something objective, external, existing in its
own right. You also believe that the nature of reality is self-evident.
When you delude yourself into thinking that you see something, you as¬
sume that everyone else sees the same thing as you. But I tell you, Win¬
ston, that reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind, and
nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and
in any case soon perishes; only in the mind of the Party, which is collec¬
tive and immortal."

O'Brien admits that for certain purposes, such as navigating the ocean, it is
useful to assume that the Earth goes around the sun and that there are stars in
distant galaxies. But, he continues, the Party could also use alternative as¬
tronomies in which the sun goes around the Earth and the stars are bits of fire
a few kilometers away. And though O’Brien does not explain it in this scene,
Newspeak is the ultimate "prisonhouse of language;' a "language that thinks
man and his (world.' ”

O’Brien's lecture should give pause to the advocates ofpostmodernism. It
is ironic that a philosophy that prides itself on deconstructing the accou¬
trements of power should embrace a relativism that makes challenges to
power impossible, because it denies that there are objective benchmarks
against which the deceptions of the powerful can be evaluated. For the same
reason, the passages should give pause to radical scientists who insist that
other scientists' aspirations to theories with objective reality (including theo¬
ries about human nature) are really weapons to preserve the interests of the
dominant class, .gender, and race." Without a notion of objective truth, intel-

426/The Voice of the Species

lectuallife degenerates into a struggle of who can best exercise the raw force to
"control the past."

A second precept of the Party's philosophy is the doctrine of the super¬
organism:

Can you not understand, Winston, that the individual is only a cell? The
weariness of the cell is the vigor of the organism. Do you die when you
cut your fingemailsi"

The doctrine that a collectivity (a culture, a society, a class, a gender) is a living
thing with its own interests and belief system lies behind Marxist political
philosophies and the social science tradition begun by Durkheim. Orwell is
showing its dark side: the dismissal of the individual-the only entity that lit¬
erally feels pleasure and pain-as a mere component that exists to further the
interests of the whole. The sedition of Winston and his lover Julia began in the
pursuit of simple human pleasures-sugar and coffee, white writing paper,
private conversation, affectionate lovemaking. O'Brien makes it clear that such
individualism will not be tolerated: "There will be no loyalty, except loyalty to
the Party. There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother,"?

The Party also believes that emotional ties to family and friends are
"habits" that get in the way of a smoothly functioning society:

Already we are breaking down the habits of thought that have survived
from before the Revolution. We have cut the links between child and
parent, and between man and man, and between man and woman. No
one dares trust a wife or a child or a friend any longer. But in the future
there will be no wives and no friends. Children will be taken from their
mothers at birth, as one takes eggs from a hen. The sex instinct will be
eradicated_There will be no distinction between beauty and ugli¬

ness."

It is hard to read the passage and not think of the current enthusiasm for
proposals in which enlightened mandarins would reengineer childrearing,
the arts, and the relationship between the sexes in an effort to build a better '
society.

Dystopian novels, of course, work by grotesque exaggeration. Any idea
can be made to look terrifying in caricature, even if it is reasonable in moder¬
ation. I do not mean to imply that a concern 'with the interests of society or in
improving human relationships is a step toward totalitarianism. But satire can
show how popular ideologies may have forgotten downsides-in this case,
how the .notion that language, thought, and emotions are social conventions

The Voice of the Species / 427

creates an opening for social engineers to try to reform them. Once we become
aware of the downsides, we no longer have to treat the ideologies as sacred
cows to which factual discoveries must be subordinated.

And finally we get to the core of the Party's philosophy. O'Brien has re¬
futed everyone ofWinston's arguments, dashed everyone ofhis hopes. He has
informed him, "If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping
on a human face-forever:' Toward the end of this dialogue, O'Brien reveals
the proposition that makes the whole nightmare possible (and whose false¬
hood, we may surmise, will make it impossible).

As usual, the voice had battered Winston into helplessness. Moreover he
was in dread that if he persisted in his disagreement O'Brien would twist
the dial again. And yet he could not keep silent. Feebly, without argu¬
ments, with nothing to support him except his inarticulate horror of
what O'Brien had said, he returned to the attack.

"I don't know-I don't care. Somehow you will fail. Something will
defeat you. Life will defeat you."

"We control life, Winston, at all its levels. You are imagining that
there is something called human nature which will be outraged by what
we do and will turn against us. Butwe create human nature. Men are in¬
finitely malleable,"?

THE THREE WORKS I have discussed are didactic and unanchored in anyex-
isting time and place. The remaining two are different. Both are rooted in "a
culture, a locale, and an era. Both savor their characters' language, milieu, and
philosophies of life. And both authors warned their readers not to generalize
from the stories. Yetboth authors are famous for their insight into human na¬
ture, and I believe I am doing them no injustice by presenting episodes from
their works in that light.

Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is an especially perilous
source for lessons because it begins with the following order of the author:
"Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; per¬
sons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to
find a plot in it will be shot." That has not deterred a century of critics from
noting its dual power. Huckleberry Finn shows us both the foibles of the ante¬
bellum South and the foibles ofhuman nature, as seen through the eyesoftwo
noble savages who sample them as they float down the Mississippi River.

Huckleberry Finn revels in many human imperfections, but perhaps the
most tragicomic is the origin of violence in a culture of honor. The culture of
honor is really a psychology of honor: a package of emotions that includes a
loyalty to kin, a hunger for revenge, and a drive to maintain a reputation for
toughness and valor. When sparked by other human sins-envy, lust, self-

428/The Voiceof the Species

deception-they can fuel a vicious cycle of violence, as each side finds itself
unable to abjure revenge against the other. The cycle can become amplified in
certain places, among them the American South.

Huck met up with the culture of honor on two occasions in quick suc¬
cession. The first was when he stowed away on a barge manned by a "rough¬
looking lot» of hard-drinking men. After one of them was about to belt out
the fifteenth verse of a raunchy song, an altercation of relatively trivial origin
broke out, and two men squared off to fight.

[Bob, the biggest man on the boat] jumped up in the air and cracked his
heels together again and shouted out: "Whoo-oop! I’m the original
iron-jawed, brass-mounted, copper-bellied corpse-maker from the
wilds ofArkansaw! Look at me! I’m the man they call Sudden Death and
General Desolation! Sired by a hurricane, darn'd by an earthquake, half-
brother to the cholera, nearly related to the smallpox on the mother's
side! Look at me! I take nineteen alligators and a bar'l of whisky for
breakfast when I’m in robust health, and a bushel of rattlesnakes and a
dead body when I’m ailing. I split the everlasting rocks with my glance,
and I squench the thunder when I speak! Whoo-oop! Stand back and
give me room according to my strength! Blood's my natural drink and
the wails of the dying is music to my ear. Cast your eye on me, gentle¬
men! and lay low and hold your breath, for I’m 'bout to turn myself
loose!" ...

Then the man that had started the row ... jumped up and cracked
his heels together three times before he lit again ... , and he began to
shout like this: "Whoo-oop! bow your neck and spread, for the kingdom
of sorrow's a coming! Hold me down to the earth, for I feel my powers
a-working! ... I put my hand on the sun's face and make it night in the
earth; I bite a piece out of the moon and hurry the seasons; I shake my¬
self and crumble the mountains! Contemplate me through leather-
don 't use the naked eye! I’m the man with a petrified heart and biler-iron
bowels! The massacre of isolated communities is the pastime of my idle
moments, the destruction of nationalities the serious business of my
life! The boundless vastness of the great American desert is my inclosed
property, and I bury the dead on my own premises! ... Whoo-oop! bow
your neck and spread, for the Pet Child of Calamity's a'corning!"io

They circled and flailed at each other and knocked each other's hats off, until
Bob said, as Huck describes it,

... never mind, this warn't going to be the last of this thing, because he
was a man that never forgot and never forgive, and so The Child better

The Voice of the Species / 429

look out for there was a time a-coming, just as sure as he was a living
man, that he would have to answer to him with the best blood in his
body. The Child said no man was willinger than he for that time to
come, and he would give Bob fair warning, now, never to cross his path
again, for he could never rest till he had waded in his blood, for such was
his nature, though he was sparing him now on account of his family, if
he had one."

And then a "little black-whiskered chap” sent them both sprawling. With black
eyes and red noses, they shook hands, said they had always respected each
other, and agreed to let bygones be bygones.

Later in the chapter Huck swims ashore and stumbles onto the cabin of a
family called the Grangerfords. Huck is frozen in his tracks by menacing dogs,
until a voice from the window beckons him to enter the cabin slowly.He opens
the door and finds himself staring down the barrels of three shotguns. When
the Grangerfords see that Huck is not a Shepherdson, the family with whom
they are feuding, they welcome him to live with them. Huck is captivated by
their genteel life: their lovely furnishings, their elegant dress, and their refined
manners, especially the patriarch, Col. Grangerford. "He was a gentleman all
over, and so was his family. He was well born, as the saying is, and that's worth
as much in a man as it is in a horse:'

Three of the six Grangerford sons had been killed in the feud, and the
youngest survivor. Buck, has befriended Huck. When the two boys go for a
walk and Buck shoots at a Shepherdson boy, Huck asks why he wants to kill
someone who has done nothing to hurt him. Buck explains the concept of a
feud:

"Well;’ says Buck, "a feud is this way: A man has a quarrel with another
man, and kills him; then that other man's brother kills him; then the
other brothers on both sides goes for one another; then the cousins chip
in-and by and by everybody's killed off and there ain't no more feud.
But it's kind of slow and takes a long time."

"Has this one been going on long. Buck?"

«Well, I should reckon! It started thirty years ago, or som'ers along
there. There was trouble 'bout something and then a lawsuit to settle it,
and the suit went agin one of the men and so he up and shot the man
that won the suit-which he would naturally do, of course. Anybody
would."

"What was the trouble about, Buck?-land?"

"I reckon maybe-I don't know."

"Well.who done the shooting? Was it a Grangerford or a Shepherd¬
son?"

430/The Voice of the Species

"Laws,how do / know? It was so long ago.”.

"Don't anybody know?"

"Oh, yes, pa knows, 1 reckon, and some of the other old people; but
they don't know now what the row was about in the first place." 12

Buck adds that the feud is carried along by the two families' sense of
honor: "There ain't a coward amongst them Shepherdsons-not a one. And
there ain't no cowards amongst the Grangerfords either,"? The reader antici¬
pates trouble, and it comes soon enough. A Grangerford girl runs off with a
Shepherdson boy, the Grangerfords head off in hot pursuit, and all the
Grangerford males are killed in an ambush. "1 ain't a'going to tell rz//that hap¬
pened:' says Huck; "it would make me sick again if I was to do that. I wished I
hadn't ever come ashore that night to see such things,"!' .

In the course of the chapter Huck has met up with two instances of the
Southern culture of honor. Among the low-lifes it amounted to hollow bluster
and was played for laughs; among the aristocrats it led to the devastation of
two families and played out as tragedy. I think Twain was commenting on the
twisted logic of violence and how it cuts across our stereotypes of refined and
coarse classes of people. Indeed, the moral reckoning does not just cut across
the classes but inverts them: the riffraff resolve their pointless dispute with
face-saving verbiage; the gentlemen pursue their equally pointless one to a
dreadful conclusion.

.Though thoroughly Southern, the perverse psychology of the Granger-
ford-Shepherdson feud is familiar from the history and ethnography of just
about any region of the world, (In particular, Huck's introduction to the
Grangerfords was hilariously replayed in Napoleon Chagnon's famous ac¬
count of his baptism into anthropological fieldwork, in which he stumbled
into a feuding Yanomamo village and found himself trapped by dogs and star¬
ing down the shafts of poison arrows.) And it is familiar in the cycles of vio¬
lence that continue to be played out by gangs, militias, ethnic groups, and
respectable nation-states. Twain's depiction of the origins of endemic violence
in an entrapping psychology of honor has a timelessness that will, I predict,
make it outlast fashionable theories of the causes and cures of violence.

THE final THEME I wish to reprise is that the human tragedy lies in the par¬
tial conflicts of interest that are inherent to all human relationships. 1 suppose
1 could illustrate it with just about any great work of fiction. An immortal lit¬
erary text expresses "all the principal constants of conflict in the condition of
man:' wrote George Steiner about Antigone; "Ordinary people experiencing
friction on the page iswhat warms our hands and hearts as we write:' observed
John Updike. But one novel caught my eye by flaunting the idea in its title:
Isaac Bashevis Singer's Enemies, A LoveStory.15

The Voice of the Species / 431

Singer, like Twain, protests too much against the possibility that his read¬
ers might draw morals from the slice of life he presents. "Although I did not
have the privilege of going through the Hitler holocaust, I have lived for years
in New York with refugees from this ordeal. I therefore hasten to say that this
novel is by no means the story of the typical refugee, his life, and struggle....
The characters are not only Nazi victims but victims of their own personalities
and fates:' In literature'the exception is the rule, Singer writes, but only after
noting that the exception is rooted in the rule. Singer has been praised as a
keen observer of human nature, not least because he imagines what happens
when fate puts ordinary characters in extraordinary dilemmas. This is the con¬
ceit behind his book and the superb 1989 film adaptation, directed by Paul
Mazursky and featuring Anjelica Huston and Ron Silver.

Herman Broder lives in Brooklyn in 1949 with his second wife, Yadwiga,a
peasant girl who worked for his parents as a servant when they lived in Poland.
A decade earlier his first wife, Tamara, had taken their two children to visit her
parents, and while they were separated the Nazis invaded Poland. Tamara and
the children were shot; Herman survived because Yadwigahid him in her fam¬
ily's hayloft. At the end of the war he learned of his family's fate and married
Yadwiga,and they found their way to New York.

While in the refugee camps, Herman had fallen in love with Masha, whom
he meets again in New York and with whom he carries on a consuming affair
(later in the book he will marry her, too). Yadwigaand Masha are, in part, male
fantasies: the first pure but simple, the second ravishing but histrionic. Her¬
man's conscience prevents him from leaving Yadwiga; his passion prevents
him from leaving Masha. This brings much misery all around, but Singer does
not let us hate Herman too much because we see how the capricious horror of
the Holocaust has left hint a fatalist with no confidence that his decisions can
affect the course of his life. Moreover, Herman is amply punished for his du¬
plicity by a life of high anxiety, which Singer portrays with comic, at times
sadistic, relish.

The cruel joke continues when Herman learns that he has even moreoftoo
much of a good thing. It turns out that his first wife survived the Nazi bullet
and escaped to Russia; she has moved to New Yorkandis staying with her pious
elderly uncle and aunt. Every Jewin the postwar period knows ofemotional re¬
unions of the survivors of Holocaust-ravaged families, but the reunion of a
husband and a wife whom he had given up for dead is a scene of almost
unimaginable poignancy. Herman enters the apartment of Reb Abraham:

abraham: A miracle from heaven, Broder, a miracle ... Your wife has
returned.

[Abraham leaves. Tamara enters.]

tamara: Hello, Herman.

43 2/The Voice of the Species

HERMAN: I didn’t know thatyou were alive.

Tamara: That’s something you never knew.

Herman: It’s as if you've risen from the dead.

tamara: We were dumped in an open pit. They thought we were all
dead. But I crawled over some corpses and escaped at night. How is
it my uncle didn’t know where you were-we had to put an adver¬
tisement in the paper?

Herman: I don't have my own apartment. I live with someone else.

tamara: What do you do? Where do you live?

Herman: I didn’t know you were alive and-

tamara [smiles]: Who is the lucky woman who has taken my place?

Herman [stunned; then replies]: She was our servant. You knew
her ... Yadwiga.

tamara [about to laugh]: You married her? Forgive me, but wasn't she
simple-minded? She didn't even know how to put on a pair of
shoes. I remember your mother telling me how she tried to put the
left shoe on the right foot. If she was given money to buy some¬
thing, she would lose it.

Herman: She-saved my life.

tamara: Was there no other way to repay her? Well, I'd better not ask.

Do you have any children by her?

HERMAN: No.

tamara: It wouldn't shock me if you did. I assumed you crawled into
bed with her even when you were with me.

HERMAN: That's nonsense. I never crawled into bed with her-

tamarA: Oh, really. Well we never really did have a marriage. All we
ever did was argue. You never had any respect for me, for my
ideas-

herman: That's not true. Youknow that-

abraham [enters the room, addresses Herman]: You may stay with us
until you find an apartment. Hospitality is an act of charity, and be¬
sides, you are relatives. As the Holy Book says, "And thou shalt not
hide thyself from thine own flesh."

tamara [interrupting]: Uncle, he has another wife."

Yes, within seconds of the miraculous reunion they are bickering, picking
up from where they left offwhen they were separated a decade before. What a
wealth of psychology is folded into that scene! Men's inclination to polygamy
and the frustrations it inevitably brings. Women's keener social intelligence
and their preference for verbal over physical aggression against romantic ri¬
vals. The stability of personality over the lifespan. The way that social behav¬
ior is elicited by the specifics of a situation, especially the specifics of other

The Voice of the Speciesr 433

people, so that two people play out the same dynamic whenever they are to¬
gether.

Though it is a scene of considerable sadness, it has a streak of sly humor,
as we watch these pathetic souls forgo their chance to savor a moment of rare
good fortune and slip instead into petty quarreling. And Singer's biggest joke
is on us. Dramatic conventions, and a belief in cosmic justice, lead us to expect
that suffering has ennobled these characters and that we are about to witness a
scene of great drama and pathos. Instead we are shown what we ought to have
expected all along: real human beings with all their follies. Nor is the episode a
display of cynicism or misanthropy: we are not surprised when later in the
story Herman and Tamara share moments of tenderness, or that a wise
Tamara will offer him his only chance at redemption. It is a scene that has the
voice of the species in it: that infuriating, endearing, mysterious, predictable,
and eternally fascinating thing we call human nature.

434 / The Voice of the Species

APPENDIX

Donald E. Brown’s List of Human Universals

THIS LIST, COMPILED in 1989 and published in 1991, consists primarily of
"surface” universals ofbehavior and overt language noted by ethnographers. It
does not list deeper universals of mental structure that are revealed by theory
and experiments. It also omits near-universals (traits that most, but not all,
cultures show) and conditional universals ("If a culture has trait.A, it always
has trait B"). A list of items added since 1989 is provided at the end. For dis¬
cussion and references, see Brown's Human Universals (1991) and his entry
for "Human Universals" in The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences
(Wilson & Keil. 1999).

abstraction in speech and
thought

actions under self-

control distinguished
from those not under
control
aesthetics

affection expressed and

felt

age grades

age statuses

age terms

ambivalence

anthropomorphization

antonyms

baby talk

belief in supernatural/
.religion
beliefs, false
beliefs about death

beliefs about disease
beliefs about fortune and
misfortune

binary cognitive distinc¬
tions

biological mother and
social mother
normally the same
person

black (color term)
body adornment
childbirth customs
childcare
childhood fears
childhood fear of loud
noises

childhood fear of
strangers

choice making (choosing
alternatives)

classification
classification of age
classification of behav¬
ioral propensities
classification of body
parts

classification of colors
classification of fauna
classification of flora
classification of inner
states

classification of kin
classification of sex
classification of space
classification of tools
classification of weather
conditions
coalitions
collective identities
conflict

Appendix / 435

conflict, consultation to
deal with

conflict, means of deal¬
ing with

conflict, mediation of
conjectural reasoning
containers

continua (ordering as
cognitive pattern)
contrasting marked and
nonmarked sememes
(meaningful elements
in language)
cooking
cooperation
cooperative labor
copulation normally
conducted in
privacy

corporate (perpetual)
statuses
coyness display
crying

cultural variability
culture

culture/nature distinc¬
tion

customary greetings
daily routines
dance

death rituals
decision making
decision making, collec¬
tive

directions, giving of
discrepancies between
speech, thought, and
action

dispersed groups
distinguishing right and
wrong
diurnality
divination
division of labor
division of labor by age
division of labor by sex
dreams

dream interpretation
economic inequalities
economic inequalities,
consciousness of
emotions
empathy

entification (treating pat¬
terns and relations as
things)

environment, adjust¬
ments to
envy

envy, symbolic means of
coping with
ethnocentrism
etiquette
explanation
face (word for)
facial communication
facial expression of anger
facial expression of con¬
tempt

facial expression of dis¬
gust

facial expression of fear
facial expression of hap¬
piness

facial expression of sad¬
ness

facial expression of sur¬
prise

facial expressions, mask¬
ing/modifying of
family (or household)
father and mother, sepa¬
rate kin terms for
fears

fears, ability to overcome
some
feasting

females do more direct
childcare
figurative speech
fire

folklore

food preferences
food sharing

future, attempts to
predict

generosity admired

gestures

gift giving

good and bad distin¬
guished
gossip

government
grammar
group living

groups that are not based
on family
hairstyles
hand (word for)
healing the sick (or at¬
tempting to)
hospitality
hygienic care
identity, collective
incest between mother
and son unthinkable
or tabooed
incest, prevention or
avoidance

in-group distinguished
from out-group(s)
in-group, biases in favor
of

inheritance rules

insulting

intention

interest in bioforms (liv¬
ing things or things
that resemble them)
interpreting behavior
. intertwining (e.g., weav¬
ing)
jokes

kin, close distinguished
from distant
kin groups

kin terms translatable by
basic relations of pro¬
creation
kinship statuses
language

436/Appendix

language employed to
manipulate others
language employed to
misinform or mislead
language is translatable
language not a simple
reflection of reality
language, prestige from
proficient use of
law (rights and obliga¬
tions)

law (rules of member¬
ship)
leaders
lever

linguistic redundancy
logical notions
logical notion of'and"
logical notion of "equiva¬
lent"

logical notion of "gen¬
eral/particular"
logical notion of "not"
logical notion of "oppo¬
site"

logical notion of
"part/whole"
logical notion of "same"
magic

magic to increase life
magic to sustain life
magic to win love
male and female and adult
and child seen as hav¬
ing different natures
males dominate publici
political realm
males more aggressive
males more prone to
lethal violence
males more prone to
theft

manipulate social rela¬
tions

marking at phonemic,
syntactic, and lexical
levels

marriage
materialism
meal times

meaning, most units of
are non-universal
measuring
medicine
melody
memory
metaphor
metonym

mood- or consciousness-
altering techniques
and/or substances
morphemes
mother normally has
consort during child-
rearing years
mourning
murder proscribed
music

music, children's
music related in part to
dance

music related in part to
religious activity
music seen as art (a cre¬
ation)

music, vocal
music, vocal, includes
speech forms
musical redundancy
musical repetition
musical variation
myths
narrative

nomenclature (perhaps
the same as classifica¬
tion)

nonbodily decorative art
normal distinguished
from abnormal states
nouns

numerals (counting)
Oedipus complex
oligarchy (de facto)
one (numeral)

onomatopoeia
overestimating objectiv¬
ity ofthought
pain

past/present/future
person, concept of
personal names
phonemes

phonemes defined by
sets of minimally con¬
trasting features
phonemes, merging of
phonemes, range from
10 to 70 in number
phonemic change, in¬
evitability of

phonemic change, rules of
phonemic system
planning

planning for future
play

play to perfect skills
poetry/rhetoric
poetic line, uniform
length range

poetic lines characterized
by repetition and vari¬
ation

poetic lines demarcated
by pauses

polysemy (one word has
several related mean¬
ings)

possessive, intimate
possessive, loose
practice to improve skills
preference for own chil¬
dren and close kin
(nepotism)
prestige inequalities
private inner life
promise
pronouns

pronouns, minimum two
numbers

pronouns, minimum
three persons

Appendix / 437

proper names
property

psychological defense
mechanisms
rape

rape proscribed
reciprocal exchanges (of
labor, goods, or ser¬
vices)

reciprocity, negative (re¬
venge, retaliation)
reciprocity, positive
recognition of individu¬
als by face
redress of wrongs
rhythm

right-handedness as pop¬
ulation norm
rites of passage
rituals

role and personality seen
in dynamic interrela¬
tionship (i.e., depar¬
tures from role can be
explained in terms of
individual personality)
sanctions

sanctions for crimes
against the collectivity
sanctions include re¬
moval from the social
unit

self distinguished from
other

self as neither wholly
passive nor wholly au¬
tonomous

self as subject and object
self is responsible
semantics

semantic category of af¬
fecting things and
people

semantic category of di¬
mension

semantic category of giv¬
ing

semantic category of lo¬
cation

semantic category of mo¬
tion

semantic category of
speed

semantic category of
other physical proper¬
ties

semantic components
semantic components,
generation

semantic components,
sex

sememes, commonly
used ones are short,
infrequently used
ones are longer
senses unified
sex (gender) terminology
is fundamentally bi¬
nary

sex statuses
sexual attraction
sexual attractiveness
sexual jealousy
sexual modesty
sexual regulation
sexual regulation in¬
cludes incest preven¬
tion

sexuality as focus of in¬
terest
shelter

sickness and death seen
as related

snakes, wariness around
social structure
socialization
socialization expected
from senior kin
socialization includes
toilet training
spear

special speech for special
occasions
statuses and roles

statuses, ascribed and
achieved

statuses distinguished
from individuals
statuses on other than
sex; age, or kinship
bases

stop/nonstop contrasts
(in speech sounds)
succession
sweets preferred
symbolism
SYmbolic speech
synonyms
taboos

tabooed foods
tabooed utterances
taxonomy
territoriality
time

time, cyclicity of
tools

tool dependency
tool making
tools for cutting
tools to make tools
tools patterned
culturally
tools, permanent
tools for pounding
trade

triangular awareness
(assessing relation¬
ships among the
self and two other
people)

true and false distin¬
guished
turn-taking
two (numeral)
tying material (i.e.,

something like string)
units of time
verbs

violence, some forms of
proscribed
visiting

438 / Appendix

vocalic/ nonvocalic
contrasts in
phonemes
vowel contrasts

anticipation

attachment

critical learning periods
differential valuations
dominance/submission
fairness (equity),
concept of
fear of death
habituation
hope

husband older than wife
on average
imagery

institutions (organized
co-activities)
intention
interpolation
judging others
likes and dislikes
making comparisons

weaning

weapons

weather control (at¬
tempts to)

Additions Since 1989

males, on average, travel
greater distances over
lifetime

males engage in more
coalitional violence
mental maps
mentalese
moral sentiments
moral sentiments.,
limited effective
range of

precedence, concept of
(that’s how the leop¬
ard got its spots)
pretend play
pride

proverbs, sayings
proverbs, sayings-in
mutually contradic¬
tory forms

white (color term)
world view

resistance to abuse of
power, to dominance
risk taking
self-control

self-image, awareness of
(concern for what
others think)
self-image, manipulation
of

self-image, wanted to be
positive

sex differences in spatial
cognition and behavior
shame

stinginess, disapproval of
sucking wounds
synesthetic metaphors
thumb sucking
tickling

toys, playthings

Appendix /439

NOTES

PREFACE

1. Herrnstein & Murray, 1994, p. 311.

2. Harris, 1998a, p. 2.

3. Thornhill & Palmer, 2000, p. 176; quota¬
tion modified to make it gender-neutral.

4. Hunt, 1999; Jensen, 1972; Kors & Silver-
glate, 1998; J. P.Rushton, "The new enemies of
evolutionary science:'Liberty, March 1998,

pp. 31-35; "Psychologist Hans Eysenck,
Freudian critic, dead at 81:'Associated Press,
September 8,1997.

PART I: THE BLANK SLATE, THE NOBLE
SAVAGE, AND THE GHOST IN THE
MACHINE

1. Macnamara, 1999; Passmore, 1970;
Stevenson & Haberman, 1998; Ward, 1998.

2. Genesis 1:26.

3. Genesis 3:16.

4. This is according to interpretations post¬
dating the Bible, which did not clearly distin¬
guish mind from body.

5. Creation: Opinion Dynamics, August 30,
1999; miracles: Princeton Survey Research As¬
sociates. April IS,2000; angels: Opinion Dy¬
namics, December 5,1997; devil: Princeton
Survey Research Associates, April 20, 2000; af¬
terlife: Gallup Organization, April 1, 1998; evo¬
lution: Opinion Dynamics, August 30, 1999.
Available through the Roper Center at the Uni¬
versity of Connecticut Public Opinion Online:
www.ropercenter.uconn.edu.

Chapter l:The Official Theory

1. Locke, 1690/1947, bk. II, chap. l,p. 26.

2. Hacking, 1999.

3. Rousseau, 1755/1994, pp. 61-62.

4. Hobbes, 1651/1957, pp. 185-186.

5. Descartes, 1641/1967, Meditation VI,

p.I77.

6. Ryle,1949,pp.13-17.

7. Descartes, 1637/2001, part V,p.lO.

8. Ryle, 1949, p. 20.

9. Cohen. 1997.

10. Rousseau, 1755/1986, p. 208.

11. Rousseau, 1762/1979, p. 92.

12. Quoted in Sowell, 1987, p. 63.

13. Originally in RedFlag (Beijing), June 1,
1958; quoted in Courtois etal., 1999.

14. J. Kalb, "The downtown gospel according
to Reverend Billy: 1 2 3 4 5 New York Times, February
27,2000.

15. D. R.Vickery, "And who speaks for our
earth?" Boston Globe, December 1, 1997.

16. Green, 2001; R. Mishra, "What can stem
cells really do?" Boston Globe, August 21, 2001.

Chapter 2: Silly Putty

1. Jespersen, 1938/1982, pp. 2-3.

2. Degler, 1991; Fox, 1989; Gould, 1981;
Richards, 1987.

3. Degler, 1991; Fox, 1989; Gould, 1981;
Rachels, 1990; Richards, 1987; Ridley, 2000.

4. Degler, 1991; Gould, 1981; Kevles, 1985;
Richards, 1987; Ridley, 2000.

5. The term "Standard Social Science
Model” was introduced by John Tooby and
Leda Cosmides (1992). The philosophers Ron
Mallon and Stephen Stich (2000) use "social
constructionism" because it is close in mean¬
ing but shorter. "Social construction" was
coined by one of the founders of sociology,
Emile Durkheim, and is analyzed by Hacking,
1999.

Notes to Pages viii-I? I 441

6. See "Curti, 1980; Degler, 1991; Fox, 1989;
Freeman, 1999; Richards, 1987; Shipman,

1994; Tooby & Cosmides, 1992.

7. Degler, 1991, p. viii.

8. White, 1996.

9. Quoted in Fox, 1989, p. 68.

10. Watson, 1924/1998.

11. Quoted in Degler, 1991, p. 139.

12. Quoted in Degler, 1991, pp. 158-159.

13. Breland & Breland, 1961.

14. Skinner, 1974.

15. Skinner, 1971.

16. Fodor & Pylyshyn, 1988; Gallistel. 1990;
Pinker &Mehler, 1988.

17. Gallistel,2000.

18. Preuss, 1995; Preuss, 2001.

19. Hirschfeld & Gelman, 1994.

20. Ekman & Davidson. 1994; Haidt, in
press.

21. Daly, Salmon, & Wilson, 1997.

22. McClelland, Rumelhart, & the PDP Re¬
search Group, 1986; Rumelhart, McClelland, &
the PDP Research Group, 1986.

23. Rumelhart & McClelland, 1986, p.143.

24. Quoted in Degler, 1991, p.148.

25. Boas, 1911. My thanks to David Kem-
merer for the examples.

26. Degler, 1991; Fox, 1989; Freeman, 1999.

27. Quoted in Degler, 1991, p. 84.

28. Quoted in Degler, 1991, p. 95.

29. Quoted in Degler, 1991, p. 96.

30. Durkheim, 1895/1962, pp. 103-106.

31. Durkheim, 1895/1962, p. 110.

32. Quoted in Degler, 1991, p. 161.

33. Quoted in Tooby & Cosmides, 1992,

p.26.

34. Ortega y Gasset, 1935/2001.

35. Montagu, 1973a, p. 9. The portion before
the ellipsis is from an earlier edition, quoted in
Degler, 1991, p. 209.

36. Benedict, 1934/1959, p. 278.

37. Mead, 1935/1963,p.280.

38. Quoted in Degler, 1991, p. 209.

39. Mead, 1928.

40. Geertz, 1973, p. 50.

41. Geertz, 1973, p. 44.

42. Shweder, 1990.

43. Quoted in Tooby & Cosmides, 1992,

P’22.

44. Quoted in Degler, 1991, p. 208.

45. Quoted in Degler, 1991, p. 204.

46. Degler, 1991; Shipman, 1994.

47. Quoted in Degler, 1991, p. 188.

48. Quoted in Degler, 1991, pp.103-104.

49. Quoted in Degler, 1991, p. 210.

50. Cowie, 1999; Elman et ah, 1996,
pp.390-391.

51. Quoted in Degler, 1991, p. 330.

52. Quoted in Degler, 1991, p. 95.

53. Quoted in Degler, 1991, p. 100.

54. Charles Singer, A shorthistoryofbiology;
quoted in Dawkins, 1998, p. 90.

Chapter 3: The Last Wall to Fall

1. Wilson, 1998. The idea was first devel¬
oped by John Tooby and Leda Cosmides, 1992.

2. Anderson, 1995; Crevier, 1993; Gardner,
1985; Pinker, 1997.

3. Fodor. 1994; Haugeland, 1981; Newell.
1980; Pinker, 1997, chap. 2.

4. Brutus. 1. by Selmer Bringsjord. S.
Bringsjord, "Chess is too easy; 1 Technology Re¬
view, March/April 1998, pp. 23-28.

5. EMI (Experiments in Musical Intelli¬
gence), by David Cope. G. Johnson, "The
artist's angst is all in your head;' New York
Times, November 16, 1997, p. 16.

6. Aaron, by Harold Cohen. G. Johnson,
"The artist's angst is all in your head;' New
York Times, November 16, 1997, p. 16.

7. Goldenberg, Mazursky, & Solomon, 1999.

8. Leibniz, 1768/1996,bk. II, chap, i, p. 111.

9. Leibniz, 1768/1996, preface, p. 68.

10. Chomsky, 1975; Chomsky, 1988b; Fodor,
1981.

11. Elman et ah, 1996; Rumelhart & McClel¬
land, 1986.

12. Dennett, 1986.

13. Elman et ah, 1996, p. 82.

14. Elman et ah, 1996, pp. 99-100.

15. Chomsky, 1975; Chomsky, 1993; Chom¬
sky, 2000; Pinker, 1994.

16. See also Miller, Galanter, & Pribram,

1960; Pinker, 1997, chap. 2; Pinker, 1999,
chaps. 1, 10.

17. Baker, 2001.

18. Baker, 2001.

19. Shweder, 1994; see Ekman & Davidson,
1994, and Lazarus, 1991, for discussion.

20. See Lazarus, 1991, for a review of theo¬
ries of emotion.

21. Mallon & Stich, 2000.

22. Ekman & Davidson. 1994; Lazarus, 1991.

23. Ekman & Davidson. 1994.

24. Fodor, 1983; Gardner, 1983; Hirschfeld &
Gelman, 1994; Pinker, 1994; Pinker, 1997.

25. Elman et ah, 1996; Karmiloff-Smith,

1992.

26. Anderson, 1995; Gazzaniga, Ivry, & Man-
gun, 1998.

27. Calvin, 1996a; Calvin, 1996b; Calvin &
Ojemann, 2001; Crick, 1994; Damasio, 1994;
Gazzaniga, 2000a; Gazzaniga, 2000b; Gaz¬
zaniga, Ivry, &Mangun, 1998; Kandel,
Schwartz, & Iessell, 2000.

442 / Notes to Pages 17-41

28. Crick. 1994.

29. 1948. translated bye. B. Garnett (New

York: Macmillan), p. 664. •

30. Damasio. 1994.

31. Damasio. 1994; Dennett, 1991; Gaz-
zaniga, 1998.

32. Gazzaniga, 1992; Gazzaniga. 1998.

33. Anderson et al„ 1999; Blair & Cipolotti,
2000; Lykken, 1995.

34. Monaghan & Glickman, 1992.

35. Bourgeois, Goldman-Rakic, & Rakic,
2000; Chalupa, 2000; Geary & Huffman, 2002;
Katz, Weliky, & Crowley, 2000; Rakic, 2000;
Rakic, 2001. See also Chapter 5.

36. Thompson et al.,2001.

37. Thompson et al., 2001.

38. Witelson, Kigar, & Harvey, 1999.

39. leVay, 1993.

40. Davidson, Putnam, & Larson, 2000;

Raine et al., 2000.

41. Bouchard, 1994;Hamer& Copeland,
1998; Lykken, 1995; Plomin, 1994; Plomin et
al., 2001; Ridley, 2000.

42. Hyman, 1999; Plomin, 1994.

43. Bouchard, 1994; Bouchard. 1998; Dama¬
sio, 2000; Lykken et al.. 1992; Plomin, 1994;
Thompson et al., 2001; Tramo et al., 1995;
Wrighl, 1995.

44. Segal, 2000.

45. Lai et al., 2001; Pinker, 2001b.

46. Frangiskakis et al., 1996.

47. Chorneyet al., 1998.

48. Benjamin et al.. 1996.

49. Lesch et al., 1996.

50. Lai et al., 2001; Pinker, 2001b.

51. Charlesworth, 1987; Miller. 2000b;
Mousseau & Roff, 1987; Tooby & Cosmides,
1990.

52. Bock & Goode, 1996; Lykken, 1995;
Mealey, 1995.

53. Blair & Cipolotti, 2000; Hare, 1993; Kir-
win, 1997; Lykken, 1995; Mealey, 1995.

54. Anderson et al.. 1999; Blair & Cipolotti.
2000; Lalumiere, Harris, & Rice, 2001; Lykken,
2000; Mealey, 1995; Rice, 1997.

55. Barkow, Cosmides, & Tooby, 1992; Bet-
zig, 1997; Buss, 1999; Cartwright, 2000; Craw¬
ford & Krebs, 1998; Evans & Zarate, 1999;
Gaulin & McBurney, 2000; Pinker, 1997; Pope,
2000; Wright, 1994.

56. Dawkins. 1983; Dawkins, 1986; Gould,
1980; Maynard Smith, 1975/1993; Ridley. 1986;
Williams, 1966.

57. Dawkins, 1983; Dawkins, 1986; Maynard
Smith, 1975/1993; Ridley, 1986; Williams, 1966.

58. The improved metaphor "megalomania-
cal gene” was suggested by the philosopher
Colin McGinn.

59. Etcoff, 1999.

60. Frank, 1988; Haidt, in press; Trivers, 1971.

61. Daly & Wilson, 1988; Frank, 1988.

62. McGuinness, 1997; Pinker, 1994.

63. Brown, 1991; Brown, 2000.

64. Baron-Cohen, 1995; Hirschfeld & GeU
man, 1994; Spelke, 1995.

65. Boyd & Silk, 1996; Calvin & Bickerton,
2000; Kingdon, 1993; Klein, 1989; Mithen,

1996.

66. Gallistel, 1992; Hauser, 1996; Hauser,
2000; Trivers, 1985.

67. James, 1890/1950, vol. 2, chap. 24.

68. Freeman, 1983; Freeman, 1999.

69. Wrangham & Peterson. 1996.

70. Wrangham & Peterson, 1996.

71. Keeley, 1996, graph adapted by Ed Hagen
from fig. 6.2 on p. 90.

72. Ghiglieri. 1999; Keeley, 1996; Wrangham
& Peterson, 1996.

73. Ember, 1978. See also Ghiglieri. 1999;
Keeley, 1996; Knauft, 1987; Wrangham & Pe¬
terson, 1996.

74. Divale, 1972; see Eibl-Eibesfeldt, 1989,
p. 323. for discussion.

75. Bamforth, 1994; Chagnon, 1996; Daly &
Wilson. 1988; Divale, 1972; Edgerton, 1992;
Ember, 1978; Ghiglieri, 1999; Gibbons. 1997;
Keeley, 1996; Kingdon, 1993; Knauft, 1987;
Krech, 1994; Krech, 1999; Wrangham & Peter¬
son, 1996.

76. Axelrod. 1984; Brown, 1991; Ridley,

1997; Wright, 2000.

ff. Brown, 1991.

Chapter 4: Culture Vultures

1. Borges, 1964, p. 30.

2. Pinker, 1984a.

3. Boyer, 1994; Hirschfeld & Gelman, 1994;
Norenzayan & Atran. in press; Schaller &
Crandall, in press; Sperber, 1994; Talmy, 2000;
Tooby&Cosmides, 1992.

4. Adams et al., 2000.

5. Tomasello, 1999.

6. Baron-Cohen, 1995; Karmiloff-Smith et
al.,1995.

7. Rapin, 2001.

8. Baldwin, 1991.

9. Carpenter. Akhtar, & Tomasello. 1998.

10. Meltzoff,1995.

11. Pinker, 1994; Pinker, 1996; Pinker, 1999.

12. Campbell & Fairey, 1989; Frank, 1985;
Kelman, 1958; Latane &Nida, 1981.

13. Deutsch & Gerard. 1955.

14. Harris, 1985,

15. Cronk, 1999; Cronk. Chagnon, & Irons,
2000 .

Notes to Pages 41-64/443

16. Pinker, 1999, chap. 10.

17. Searle, 1995.

18. Sperber, 1985; Sperber, 1994.

19. Boyd & Richerson, 1985; Cavalli-Sforza
& Feldman, 1981; Durham, 1982; Lumsden &
Wilson, 1981.

20. Cavalli-Sforza, 1991; Cavalli-Sforza &
Feldman, 1981.

21. Toussaint-Samat.1992.

22. Degler, 1991.

23. Sowell, 1996, p. 378. See also Sowell.

1994, and Sowell, 1998.

24. Diamond, 1992; Diamond, 1998.

25. Diamond, 1997.

26. Putnam, 1973.

27. Chomsky, 1980, p. 227; Marr, 1982; Tin¬
bergen, 1952.

28. Pinker, 1999.

Chapter 5: The Slate's Last Stand

1. Venter et ah, 2001.

2. See, e.g., the contributors to Rose &

Rose, 2000.

3. R. McKie, in The Guardian, February 11,
2001. See also S. J. Gould, "Humbled by the
genome's mysteries;' New York Times, Febru¬
ary 19,2001.

4. The Observer, February 11,2001.

5. E. Pennisi, "The human genome;' Sci¬
ence, 291, 2001.1 177-1180; see pp. 1178-1179.

6. "Gene count;' Science, 295, 2002, p. 29; R.
Mishar, "Biotech CEO says map missed much
of genome;' Boston Globe, April 9, 2001;

Wright et ah, 2001.

7. Claverie, 2001; Szathmary, Jordan, &P41,
2001; Venter et ah, 2001.

8. Szathmary, Jordan, & Pal, 2001.

9. Claverie,2001.

10. Venter et ah, 2001.

11. Evan Eichler, quoted by G. Vogel,
"Objection #2: Why sequence the junk?" Sci¬
ence, 291, 2001, p. 1184.

12. Elman et ah, 1996; McClelland, Rumel-
hart, & the PDP Research Group, 1986;
McLeod, Plunkett, & Rolls, 1998; Pinker, 1997,
pp. 98-111; Rumelhart, McClelland, & the
PDP Research Group, 1986.

13. Anderson, 1993; Fodor & Pylyshyn,

1988; Hadley, 1994a; Hadley, 1994b; Hummel
&Holyoak, 1997; Lachter & Bever, 1988; Mar¬
cus, 1998 ;Marcus, 2001 a;McCloskey&

Cohen, 1989; Minsky & Papert, 1988; Shastri
&Ajjanagadde, 1993; Smolensky, 1995;

Sougne, 1998.

14. Berent, Pinker, & Shimron, 1999; Marcus
et ah, 1995; Pinker, 1997; Pinker, 1999; Pinker,
2001a; Pinker & Prince, 1988.

15. Pinker, 1997, pp. 112-131.

16. Pinker, 1999. See also Clahsen, 1999;
Marcus, 2001a; Marslen-Wilson & Tyler, 1998;
Pinker, 1991.

17. See Marcus et ah, 1995, and Marcus,
2001a, for examples.

18. Hinton & Nowlan, 1987; Nolfi, Elman, &
Parish 1994.

19. For examples, see Hummel & Bieder-
man, 1992; Marcus, 2001a; Shastri, 1999;
Smolensky, 1990.

20. Deacon, 1997; Elman et ah, 1996; Hard-
castle & Buller, 2000; Panskepp & Panskepp,
2000; Quartz & Sejnowski, 1997.

21. Elman et ah, 1996, p. 108.

22. Quartz & Sejnowski, 1997, pp. 552, 555.

23. Maguire et al„ 2000.

24. E. K. Miller, 2000.

25. Sadatoetah, 1996.

26. Neville & Bavelier, 2000; Petitto et ah,
2000 .

27. Pons et ah, 1991; Ramachandran &
Blakeslee, 1998.

28. Curtiss, de Bode, & Shields, 2000;
Stromswold, 2000.

29. Catalano & Shatz, 1998; Crair, Gillespie,
& Stryker, 1998; Katz & Shatz, 1996; Miller,
Keller, & Stryker, 1989.

30. Sharma, Angelucci, & Sur, 2000; Sur,
1988; Sur, Angelucci, & Sharma, 1999.

31. For related arguments, see Geary & Huff¬
man, 2002: Katz & Crowley, 2002; Katz &

Shatz, 1996; Katz, Weliky, & Crowley, 2000;
Marcus, 2001b.

32. R. Restak, "Rewiring" (Review of The
talkingcureby S. C. Vaughan), New York Times
BookReview, June 22,1997, pp.14-15.

33. D. Milmore, “ 'Wiring' the brain for life;'
Boston Globe, November 2,1997, pp. N5-N8.

34. William Jenkins, quoted in A. Ellin, "Can
'neurobics' do for the brain what aerobics do for
the lungs?" New York Times, October 3,1999.

35. Quotations from A. Ellin, "Can 'neuro-
bicsdo for the brain what aerobics do for the
lungs?" New York Times, October 3,1999.

36. G. Kolata, "Muddling fact and fiction in
policy;' New York Times, August 8,1999.

37. Bruer, 1997;Bruer, 1999.

38. R. Saltus, "Study shows brain adaptable;'
Boston Globe, April 20, 2000.

39. Van Essen & Deyoe, 1995, p. 388.

40. Crick & Koch, 1995.

41. Bishop, Coudreau, & O'Leary, 2000;
Bourgeois, Goldman-Rakic, & Rakic, 2000;
Chalupa, 2000; Katz, Weliky' & Crowley, 2000;
Levitt, 2000; Miyashita-Lin et ah, 1999; Rakic,
2000; Rakic, 2001; Verhage et ah, 2000; Zhou &
Black, 2000.

444/Notes to Pages 64-89

42. See the references cited in the preceding
note, and also Geary & Huffman, 2002; Kru-
bitzer& Huffman, 2000; Preuss, 2000; Preuss,
2001; Tessier-Lavigne & Goodman, 1996.

43. Geary & Huffman, 2002; Krubitzer &
Huffman, 2000; Preuss, 2000; Preuss. 2001.

44. D. Normile, "Gene expression differs in
human and chimp brains;' Science, 292,2001,
pp.44-45.

45. Kaas, 2000, p. 224.

46. Hardcastle & Buller, 2000; Panksepp &
Panksepp,2000.

47. Gu & Spitzer, 1995.

48. Catalano & Shatz. 1998; Crair. Gillespie,
& Stryker, 1998; Katz & Shatz, 1996.

49. Catalano & Shatz, 1998; Crair, Gillespie,
& Stryker. 1998; Katz & Shatz, 1996; Stryker,
1994.

50. Catalano & Shatz, 1998; Stryker, 1994.

51. Wang et al„ 1998.

52. Brown, 1985; Hamer & Copeland, 1994.

53. J.R. Skoyles, June 7,1999. on an email
discussion list for evolutionary psychology.

54. Recanzone, 2000, p. 245.

55. Van Essen & Deyoe, 1995.

56. Kosslyn, 1994.

57. Kennedy, 1993; Kosslyn, 1994,

pp. 334-335; Zimler & Keenan, 1983; though
see also Arditi, Holtzman, & Kosslyn, 1988.

58. Petitto et ah, 2000.

59. Klima &Bellugi, 1979; Padden & Perl-
mutter, 1987; Siple & Fischer, 1990.

60. Cramer & Sur, 1995; Sharma, Angelucci,
& Sur. 2000; Sur. 1988; Sur, Angelucci, &
Sharma, 1999.

61. Sur. 1988, pp.44,45.

62. Bregman, 1990; Bregman & Pinker, 1978;
Kubovy, 1981.

63. Hubei; 1988.

64. Bishop, Coudreau, & O'Leary, 2000;
Bourgeois, Goldman-Rakic, & R00c,2000;
Chalupa, 2000; Geary & Huffman. 2002; Katz,
Weliky, & Crowley, 2000; Krubitzer & Huff¬
man, 2000; Levitt, 2000; Miyashita-Lin et ah,
1999; Preuss, 2000; Preuss, 2001; Rakic, 2000;
Rakic, 2001; Tessier-Lavigne & Goodman,
1996; Verhage et ah, 2000; Zhou & Black. 2000.

65. Katz, Weliky, & Crowley, 2000, p. 209.

66. Crowley & Katz. 2000.

67. Verhage et ah. 2000.

68. Miyashita-Lin et ah, 1999.

69. Bishop, Coudreau, & O'Leary, 2000. See
also R00c,2001.

70. Thompson et ah, 2001.

71. Brugger et al.,2000; Melzack, 1990;
Melzack et ah, 1997; Ramachandran, 1993.

72. Curtiss, de Bode, & Shields, 2000;
Stromswold, 2000.

73. Described in Stromswold, 2000.

74. Farah et al.,2000.

75. Anderson et al., 1999.

76. Anderson, 1976; Pinker, 1979; Pinker.
1984a; Quine, 1969.

77. Adams et ah, 2000.

78. Tooby &Cosmides, 1992; Williams, 1966.

79. Gallistel, 2000; Hauser. 2000.

80. Barkow, Cosmides, & Tooby. 1992; Burn-
ham & Phelan, 2000; Wright, 1994.

81. Brown, 1991.

82. Hirschfeld & Gelman. 1994; Pinker.

1997, chap. 5.

83. Baron-Cohen, 1995; Gopnik, Meltzoff, &
Kuhl, 1999; Hirschfeld & Gelman. 1994; Leslie,
1994; Spelke, 1995; Spelke et ah. 1992.

84. Baron-Cohen, 1995; Fisher et ah, 1998;
Fraagiskakis et ah, 1996; Hamer & Copeland,
1998; Lai et ah, 2001; Rossen et ah. 1996.

85. Bouchard, 1994; Plomin et al., 2001.

86. Caspi. 2000; McCrae et ah, 2000.

87. Bouchard, 1994; Harris, 1998a; Plomin et
ah, 2001; Turkheimer, 2000.

88. See the references cited in this chapter.

PART II: FEAR AND LOATHING
Chapter 6: Political Scientists

1. Weizenbaum, 1976.

2. Lewontin, Rose, & Kamin, 1984, p. x,

3. Herrnstein,1971.

4. Jensen, 1969; Jensen, 1972.

5. Herrnstein, 1973.

6. Darwin, 1872/1998: Pinker. 1998.

7. Ekman, 1987; Ekman, 1998.

8. Wilson. 1975/2000.

9. Sahlins, 1976, p. 3.

10. Sahlins, 1976, p. x.

11. Allen et ah, 1975, p.43.

12. Chorover, 1979, pp. 108-109.

13. Wilson, 1975/2000. p. 548.

14. Wilson, 1975/2000, p. 555.

15. Wilson, 1975/2000. p. 550.

16. Wilson, 1975/2000, p. 554.

17. Wilson, 1975/2000, p. 569.

18. Segerstrale. 2000; Wilson, 1994.

19. Wright, 1994.

20. Trivers & Newton, 1982.

21. Trivers, 1981.

22. Trivers, 1981, p. 37.

23. Gould, 1976a; Gould. 1981; Gould,

1998a; Lewontin, 1992; Lewontin, Rose. &
Kamin. 1984; Rose &Rose, 2000; Rose, 1997.

24. In titles alone, we find "determinism” in
Gould, 1976a; Rose, 1997; Rose & the Dialectics
of Biology Group, 1982; and four of the nine
chapters in Lewontin, Rose, & Kamin, 1984.

Notes to Pages 89-112 / 445

25. Lewontin, Rose, & Kamin, 1984, p. 236.

26. Lewontin, Rose, & Kamin, 1984, p. 5.

27. Dawkins, 1976/1989, p. 164.

28. Lewontin, Rose, & Kamin, 1984, p. 11.

29. Dawkins, 1985.

30. Lewontin, Rose, & Kamin, 1984, p. 287.

31. Dawkins, 1976/1989, p. 20, emphasis
added.

32. Levins & Lewontin, 1985, pp. 88,128;
Lewontin, 1983, p. 68; Lewontin, Rose, &
Kamin, 1984, p. 287. In Lewontin, 1982, p. 18,
the quotation is paraphrased as "ruled by our
genes:'

33. Lewontin, Rose, & Kamin, 1984, p.149.

34. Lewontin, Rose, & Kamin, 1984, p. 260.

35. Rose, 1997, p. 211.

36. Freeman, 1999.

37. Turner and Sponsel's letter may be found
at chief.anth. uconn. edw/gradstudentsldhumel
darkness_in_el_dorado.

38. Chagnon, 1988; Chagnon, 1992.

39. Tierney, 2000.

40. University of Michigan Report on the
Ongoing Investigation of the Neel-Chagnon
Allegations (www.umich.edul-urelldarkness.
html); John J.Miller, "The FiercePeople: The
wages of anthropological incorrectness;' Na¬
tional Review, November 20, 2000.

41. John Tooby, "Jungle fever: Did two U.S.
scientists start a genocidal epidemic in the
Amazon, or was The New Yorker duped?"

Slate, October 24, 2000; University of Michi¬
gan Report on the Ongoing Investigation of
the Neel-Chagnon Allegations (www.umich.
edu/e-urel/darkness.html); John J. Miller, "The
Fierce People: The wages of anthropological
incorrectness;' National Review, November 20,
2000; "A statement from Bruce Alberts;'Na¬
tional Academy of Sciences, November 9,

2000, www.nas. org; John Tooby, "Preliminary
Report;' Department of Anthropology,
University of California, Santa Barbara, De¬
cember 10,2000 (www.anth.ucsb.edul
ucsbprelimnaryreport.pdf; see also www.anth.
ucsb.edu/chagnon.html); Lou Marano, "Dark¬
ness in anthropology;' UPI, October 20, 2000;
Michael Shermer, "Spin-doctoring the
Yanomamo," Skeptic, 2001; Virgilio Bosh &
eight other signatories, "Venezuelan response
to Yanomamo book;' Science, 291, 2001,

pp. 985-986; "The Yanomamo and the 1960s
measles epidemic": letters from J.V. Neel, Ir.,

K. Hill, and S. L. Katz, Science, 292, June 8,

2001, pp. 1836-1837; "Yanomamo wars con¬
tinue," Science, 295, January 4,2002, p. 41;
yahoo, comlgroupl evolutionary-psychologyl
files/aaa.html, November 2001. An extensive
collection of documents related to the Tierney

affair maybe found on the web site www.anth.
uconn.edu/gradstudentsldhume/index4.htm.

42. Edward Hagen, "Chagnon and Neel
saved hundreds of lives;' The Fray, Slate, De¬
cember 8, 2000 (www.anth.uconn.edul
gradstudents/dhume/darkidarkness.0250.
html); S.L.Katz, "The Yanomamo and the
1960s measles epidemic" (letter). Science, 292,
June 8, 2001, p.1837.

43. In the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, quoted in
John J. Miller, "The Fierce People: The wages of
anthropological incorrectness," NationalRe-
view, November 20, 2000.

44. Chagnon, 1992, chaps. 5-6.

45. Valero & Biocca, 1965/1996.

46. Ember, 1978; Keeley, 1996; Knauft, 1987.

47. Tierney, 2000, p. 178.

48. Redmond, 1994, p.125; quoted in John
Tooby, Slate, October 24, 2000.

49. Sponsel, 1996, p. 115.

50. Sponsel, 1996, pp. 99,103.

51. Sponsel, 1998, p. 114.

52. Tierney, 2000, p. 38.

53. Neel, 1994.

54. John J. Miller, "The Fierce People: The
wages of anthropological incorrectness;' Na-
tionalReview, November 20, 2000.

55. Tierney, 2000, p. xxiv.

Chapter 7: The Holy Trinity

1. Hunt, 1999.

2. Halpern, Gilbert, & Coren, 1996.

3. Allen et al., 1975.

4. Gould, 1976a.

5. Lewontin, Rose, & Kamin, 1984, p. 267.

6. Lewontin, Rose, & Kamin, 1984, p. 267.

7. Lewontin, Rose, & Kamin, 1984, p. 14.

8. Lewontin, 1992, p. 123.

9. Precis of Lewontin, 1982, on the book
jacket.

10. Lewontin, 1992, p. 123.

11. Montagu, 1973a.

12. S. Gould, "A time of gifts;' New York
Times, September 26, 2001.

13. Gould, 1998b.

14. Mealey, 1995.

15. Gould, 1998a, p. 262.

16. Bamforth, 1994; Chagnon, 1996; Daly &
Wilson, 1988; Divale, 1972; Edgerton, 1992;
Ember, 1978; Ghiglieri, 1999; Gibbons, 1997;
Keeley, 1996; Kingdon, 1993; Knauft, 1987;
Krech, 1994; Krech, 1999; Wrangham & Peter¬
son, 1996.

17. Gould, 1998a, p. 262.

18. Gould, 1998a, p.265.

19. Levins & Lewontin, 1985, p. 165.

20. Lewontin, Rose, & Kamin, 1984, p. ix.

446/Notes to Pages 112-126

21. Lewontin, Rose, &Kamin, 1984, p. 76.

22. Lewontin, Rose, &Kamin, 1984, p. 270.

23. Rose, 1997, pp. 7,309.

24. Gould, 1992.

25. Hunt, 1999.

26. Quoted in J. Salamon, "A stark explana¬
tion for mankind from an unlikely rebel" (Re¬
view of the PBS series "Evolution"), New York
Times, September 24, 2001.

27. D. Wald, "Intelligent design meets con¬
gressional designers;' Skeptic, 8, 2000, p. 13.
Lyrics from "Bad Touch" by the Bloodhound
Gang.

28. Quoted in D. Falk, "Design or chance?"
Boston Globe Magazine, October 21, 2001,
pp. 14-23, quotation on p. 21.

29. National Center for Science Education,
www.ncseweb.org/pressroom.asp?branch=
statement. See also Berra, 1990; Kitcher, 1982;
Miller, 1999; Pennock, 2000; Pennock, 2001.

30. Quoted in 1. Arnhart, M. J. Behe, & W. A.
Dembski, "Conservatives, Darwin, and design:
An exchange," First Things, 107, November
2000, pp. 23-31.

31. Behe, 1996.

32. Behe, 1996; Crews, 2001; Dorit, 1997;
Miller, 1999; Pennock, 2000; Pennock, 2001;
Ruse, 1998.

33. R. Bailey, "Origin of the specious;' Rea¬
son, July 1997.

34. D. Berlinski, "The deniable Darwin,"
Commentary, June 1996. See R. Bailey, "Origin
of the specious:' Reason, July 1997. The Pope's
views on evolution are discussed in Chapter 11.

35. A 1991 essay, quoted in R. Bailey, "Origin
of the specious:' Reason, July 1997.

36. Quoted in R. Bailey, "Origin of the spe¬
cious:' Reason, July 1997.

37. R. Bailey, "Origin ofthe' specious:' Rea¬
son, July 1997.

38. 1. Kass, "The end of courtship:' Public
Interest, 126, Winter 1997.

39. A. Ferguson, "The end of nature and the
next man" (Review of F.Fukuyama's Thegreat
disruption), Weekly Standard, June 28,1999.

40. A. Ferguson, "How Steven Pinker's
mind works" (Review of S. Pinker's How the
mind works), Weekly Standard, January 12,
1998.

41. T. Wolfe, "Sorry, but your soul just died:'
Forbes ASAp, December 2, 1996; reprinted in
slightly different form in Wolfe, 2000. Ellipses
in original.

42. T. Wolfe, "Sorry, but your soul just died:'
Forbes ASAP, December 2, 1996; reprinted in
slightly different form in Wolfe, 2000.

43. C. Holden, "Darwin's brush with
racism," Science, 292,2001, p.1295. Resolution

HLS 01-2652, Regular Session, 2001, House
Concurrent Resolution No. 74 by Representa¬
tive Broome.

44. R. Wright, «The accidental creationist:'
NewYorker, December 13,1999. Similarly,the
creationist Discovery Institute used Lewontin's
attacks on evolutionary psychology to help
criticize the 2001 PBS television documentary
series "Evolution:' www.reviewevolution.com..

45. Rose, 1978.

46. T. Wolfe, "Sorry, but your soul just died:'
Forbes ASAp, December 2, 1996; reprinted in
slightly different form in Wolfe, 2000.

47. Gould, 1976b.

48. A. Ferguson, "The end of nature and the
next man" (Review of F.Fukuyama's Thegreat
disruption), Weekly Standard, 1999.

49. See Dennett, 1995, p. 263, for a similar
report.

50. E. Smith, "Look who's stalking:' New
York, Pebruary 14, 2000.

51. Alcock, 1998.

52. For example, the articles entitled "Eugen¬
ics revisited" (Horgan, 1993), "The new Social
Darwinists" (Horgan, 1995), and "Is a new eu¬
genics afoot?" (Allen, 2001).

53. New Republic, April 27, 1998, p. 33.

54. New York Times, February 18,2001, Week
in Review, p. 3.

55. Tooby & Cosmides, 1992, p. 49.

56. Chimps: Montagu, 1973b, p. 4. Heritabil-
ity of IQ: Kamin, 1974; Lewontin, Rose, &
Kamin, 1984, p.116. IQ as reification: Gould,
1981. Personality and social behavior: Lewon¬
tin, Rose, & Kamin, 1984, chap. 9. Sex differ¬
ences: Lewontin, Rose, & Kamin, 1984, p.156.
Pacific clans: Gould, 1998a, p. 262.

57. Daly, 1991.

58. Alcock, 2001.

59. Buss, 1995; Daly & Wilson, 1988; Daly &
Wilson, 1999; Etcoff, 1999; Harris, 1998a;

Hrdy, 1999; Ridley, 1993; Ridley, 1997;

Symons, 1979; Wright, 1994.

60. Plomin et al., 2001.

PART III: HUMAN NATURE WITH A
HUMAN FACE

1. Drake, 1970; Koestler, 1959.

2. Galileo, 1632/1967, pp. 58-59.

Chapter 8: The Fear of Inequality

1. From The Rambler, no. 60.

2. From the Analects.

3. Charlesworth, 1987; Lewontin, 1982;
Miller, 2000b; Mousseau & Roff, 1987; Tooby
& Cosmides, 1990.

Notes to Pages 127-142/447

4. Tooby & Cosmides, 1990.

5. Lander et al., 2001.

6. Bodmer & Cavalli-Sforza, 1970.

7. Tooby & Cosmides, 1990.

8. Patai & Patai, 1989.

9. Sowell, 1994; Sowell, 1995a.

10. Patterson, 1995; Patterson, 2000.

11. Cappon, 1959, pp. 387-392.

12. Seventh Lincoln-Douglas debate, Octo¬
ber 15, 1858.

13. Mayr, 1963, p. 649. For a more recent
statement of this argument from an evolu¬
tionary geneticist, see Crow, 2002.

14. Chomsky, 1973, pp. 362-363. See also
Segerstrale, 2000.

15. For further discussion, see Tribe, 1971.

16. LosAngelesTimes poll, December 21,
2001.

17. Nozick,1974.

18. Gould, 1981, pp. 24-25. For reviews, see
Blinkhorn, 1982; Davis, 1983; Jensen, 1982;
Rushton, 1996; Samelson, 1982.

19. Putnam, 1973, p.142.

20. See the consensus statements by Neisser
et al., 1996; Snyderman & Rothman, 1988; and
Gottfredson, 1997; and also Andreasen et al.,
1993; Caryl, 1994; Deary, 2000; Haieret al.,
1992; Reed & Jensen, 1992; Thompson et al.,
2001; Van Valen, 1974; Willerman et al., 1991.

21. Moore & Baldwin, 1903/1996; Rachels,
1990.

22. Rawls, 1976.

23. Hayek, 1960/1978.

24. Chirot, 1994; Courtois et al.,1999;

Glover, 1999.

25. Horowitz, 2001; Sowell, 1994; Sowell,
1996.

26. Lykken et al., 1992.

27. Interview in Boston Phoenix in the late
1970s, quotation reproduced from memory.
Ironically, Wald's son Elijah became a radical
science writer, like his father and his mother,
the biologist Ruth Hubbard.

28. Degler, 1991; Kevles, 1985; Ridley, 2000.

29. Bullock, 1991; Chirot, 1994; Glover,

1999; Gould, 1981.

30. Richards, 1987, p. 533.

31. Glover, 1999; Murphy, 1999.

32. Proctor, 1999.

33. LaubicWer,1999.

34. For discussions of the Marxist genocides
of the twentieth century and comparisons to
the Nazi Holocaust, see Besancon, 1998; Bul¬
lock, 1991; Chandler, 1999; Chirot, 1994; Con¬
quest, 2000; Courtois et al., 1999; Getty, 2000;
Minogue, 1999; Shatz, 1999; Short, 1999.

35. For discussions of the intellectual roots
of Marxism and comparisons with the intellec¬

tual roots of Nazism, see Berlin, 1996; Be¬
sancon, 1981; Besancon, 1998; Bullock, T991;
Chirot, 1994; Glover, 1999; Minogue, 1985;
Minogue, 1999; Scott, 1998; Sowell, 1985. For
discussions of the Marxist theory of human
nature, see Archibald, 1989; Bauer, 1952; Pla-
menatz, 1963; Plamenatz, 1975; Singer, 1999;
Stevenson &Haberman, 1998; Venable, 1945.

36. See, e.g.,Venable, 1945, p. 3.

37. Marx, 1847/1995, chap. 2.

38. Marx & Engels, 1846/1963, part 1.

39. Marx, 1859/1979, preface.

40. Marx, 1845/1989; Marx & Engels,
1846/1963.

41. Marx, 1867/1993, vol. l,p. 10.

42. Marx & Engels, 1844/1988.

43. Glover, 1999, p. 254.

44. Minogue, 1999.

45. Glover, 1999, p. 275.

46. Glover, 1999, pp. 297-298.

47. Courtois et al., 1999, p. 620.

48. See the references cited in notes 34 and
35.

49. Marx quotation from Stevenson &
Haberman, 1998, p.146; Hitler quotation from
Glover, 1999, p. 315.

50. Besancon, 1998.

51. Watson, 1985.

52. Tajfel,1981.

53. Originally in Red Flag (Beijing), June 1,
1958; quoted in Courtois et al., 1999.

Chapter 9: The Fear of Irnperfectibility

1. The Prelude, Book Sixth, "Cambridge
and the Alps;' 1. Published 1799-1805.

2. Passmore, 1970, epigraph.

3. For example, the Seville Statement on Vi¬
olence, 1990.

4. "Study says rape has its roots in evolu¬
tion;' BostonHerald, Ianuary 11,2000, p. 3.

5. Thornhill & Palmer, 2001.

6. Brownmiller & Merhof, 1992.

7. Gould, 1995, p.433.

8. Well, almost. The cartoonist, Jim John¬
son, told me that he may have slandered wal¬
ruses: he subsequently learned that it is
leopard seals that kill penguins for fun.

9. Williams, 1988.

10. Jones, 1999; Williams, 1988.

11. Williams, 1966, p. 255.

12. On the relevance of human natureto
morality, see McGinn, 1997; Petrinovich, 1995;
Rachels, 1990; Richards, 1987; Singer, 1981;
Wilson, 1993.

13. Masters, 1989, p. 240.

14. Daly & Wilson, 1988; Daly & Wilson,
1999.

448/Notes to Pages 142-164

15. Jones, 1997.

16. Daly&Wilson, 1999, pp. 58-66.

17. Science Friday, National Public Radio,
May 7,1999.

18. Singer, 1981.

19. Maynard Smith & Szathmary, 1997;
Wright, 2000.

20. De Waal, 1998; Fry, 2000.

21. Axelrod, 1984; Brown, 1991; Fry, 2000;
Ridley, 1997; Wright, 2000.

22. Singer, 1981.

23. Skinner, 1948/1976; Skinner, 1971; Skin¬
ner, 1974.

24. Chomsky, 1973.

25. Berlin, 1996; Chirot, 1994; Conquest,
2000; Glover, 1999; Minogue, 1985; Minogue,
1999; Scott, 1998.

26. Scott, 1998.

27. Quoted in Scott, 1998, pp. 114-115.

28. Perry. 1997.

29. Harris, 1998a.

30. From a dialogue with Betty Friedan in
Saturday Review, June 14, 1975, p. 18. quoted
in Sommers, 1994, p. 18.

31. Quoted by Elizabeth Powers, Commen¬
tary, January 1, 1997.

32. From a talk at the Cornell University In¬
stitute on Women and Work, quoted by C.
Young, "The mommy wars:' Reason, July 2000.

33. LizaMundy, "The New Clitics:’ Lingua
Franca, 3, September/October 1993, p. 27.

34. "Prom Carol Gilligan's chair: 1 interview
by Michael Norman, New York TimesMaga-
zine, November 7,1997.

35. Letter by Bruce Bodner, New York Times
Magazine. November 30,1997.

36. C. Young, "Where the boys are," Reason,
February 2, 2001.

37. Sommers, 2000.

Chapter 10: The Fear of Determinism

1. Kaplan, 1973, p. 10.

2. E. Felsenthal, "Man's genes made him
kill,his lawyers claim:' Wall Streetjoumal, No¬
vember 15, 1994. The defense was unsuccess¬
ful: see "Mobley v. The State:' Supreme Court
of Georgia, March 17, 1995, 265 Ga. 292, 455

S.E.2d 61.

3. "Lawyers may use genetics study in rape
defense:' NationalPost (Canada), January 22,
2000,p.A8.

4. Jones, 2000; Jones, 1999.

5. Dennett, 1984. See also Kane, 1998; Noz-
ick, 1981, pp. 317-362; Ridley, 2000; Staddon,
1999.

6. Dershowitz, 1994; J.Ellement, "Alleged
con man's defense: 'Different' mores '.'Boston

Globe, February 25,1999; N. Hall, "Metis
woman avoids jail term for killing her hus¬
band: 1 NationalPost (Canada), January 20,

1999.

7. B. English, "David Lisak seeks out a dia¬
logue with murderers," Boston Globe, July 27,

2000 .

8. M. Williams, "Social work in the city: Re¬
wards and risks:’A/ew York Times, July 30, 2000.

9. S. Morse, Review ofC. Sandford's Spring¬
steen point blank, Boston Globe, November 19,
1999.

10. M. Udovich, Review of M. Meade's The
unruly lifeof Woody Allen, New York Times,
March 5,2000.

11. 1. Franks, Interview with Hillary Clin¬
ton, Talk, August 1999.

12. K.Q. Seelye, "Clintons try to quell debate
over interview:' NewYork Times, August 5,1999.

13. Dennett, 1984; Kane, 1998; Nozick, 1981,
pp. 317-362; Ridley, 2000; Staddon, 1999.

14. Quoted in Kaplan, 1973, p.16.

15. Daly&Wilson, 1988; Frank, 1988;

Pinker, 1997; Schelling, 1960.

16. Quoted in Kaplan, 1973, p. 29.

17. Daly&Wilson, 1988, p.256.

18. Dershowitz, 1994; Faigman, 1999; Kap¬
lan, 1973; Kirwin, 1997.

19. Rice, 1997.

Chapter 11: The Fear of Nihilism

1. October 22, 1996; reprinted in the En¬
glish edition of L'Osser\>atore Romano, October
30,1996.

2. Macnamara. 1999; Miller, 1999; New-
some, 2001; Ruse, 2000.

3. See Nagel, 1970; Singer, 1981.

4. Cummins, 1996; Trivers, 1971; Wright,
1994.

5. Zahn-Wexleret ah, 1992.

6. Brown, 1991.

7. Hare, 1993; Lykken, 1995; Mealey, 1995;
Rice, 1997.

8. Rachels, 1990.

9. Murphy, 1999.

10. Damewood,2001.

11. Ron Rosenbaum, "Staring into the heart
ofdarknessd/Vew York Times Magazine, June4,
1995; Daly & Wilson, 1988, p. 79.

12. Antonaccio & Schweiker, 1996; Brink,
1989; Murdoch, 1993; Nozick, 1981; Sayre-
McCord, 1988.

13. Singer, 1981.

PART IV: KNOW THYSELF
1. Alexander, 1987, pAO.

Notes to Pages 165-195/449

Chapter 12: In Touch with Reality

1. Quotation from Cartmill, 1998.

2. Shepard. 1990.

3. www-bcs.mit.edu/persci/high/gallery/
checkershadow illusion.html.

4. www-bcs.mit.edu/persci/highlgallery/
checkershadow illusion.html.

5. From the computer scientist Oliver Sel¬
fridge; reproduced in Neisser, 1967.

6. Brown, 1991.

7. Brown, 1985; Lee, Iussim, & McCauley,

1995.

8. "Phony science wars" (Review of Ian
Hacking's The social construction ofwhat?), At¬
lantic Monthly, November 1999.

9. Hacking, 1999.

10. Searle, 1995.

11. Anderson, 1990; Pinker, 1997, chaps. 2,

5; Pinker, 1999, chap. 10; Pinker & Prince,

1996.

12. Armstrong, Gleitman. & Gleitman, 1983;
Erikson & Kruschke, 1998; Marcus, 2001a;
Pinker, 1997, chaps. 2. 5; Pinker, 1999, chap.

10; Sloman, 1996.

13. Ahnetal., 2001.

14. Lee, Iussim, & McCauley, 1995.

15. McCauley, 1995; Swim, 1994.

16. Iussim, McCauley. & Lee, 1995; Me-
Cauley, 1995.

17. Iussim & Eccles, 1995.

18. Brown, 1985; Iussim, McCauley, & Lee,
1995; McCauley. 1995.

19. Gilbert & Hixon, 1991; Pratto & Bargh,
1991.

20. Brown, 1985, p. 595.

21. Iussim & Eccles, 1995; Smith, Iussim, &
Eccles, 1999.

22. Flynn, 1999; Loury, 2002; Valian,

1998.

23. Galileo, 1632/1967, p. 105.

24. Whorf, 1956.

25. Geertz. 1973, pAS.

26. Quotations from Lehman, 1992.

27. Barthes, 1972, p. 135.

28. Pinker. 1994, chap. 3.

29. Pinker, 1984a.

30. Lakoff& Johnson, 1980.

31. Iackendoff, 1996.

32. Baddeley, 1986.

33. Dehaene et al„ 1999.

34. Pinker. 1994, chap. 3; Siegal. Varley, &
Want, 2001; Weiskrantz, 1988.

35. Gallistel, 1992; Gopnik, Meltzoff, & Kuhl,
1999; Hauser, 2000.

36. Anderson, 1983.

37. Pinker, 1994.

38. "'Minority' a bad word in San Diego,"
Boston Globe, April 4, 2001; S. Schweitzer,
"Council mulls another word for 'minority,' ”
Boston Globe, August 9. 2001.

39. Brooker, 1999, pp.l 15-116.

40. Leslie, 1995.

41. Abbott, 2001; Leslie, 1995.

42. Frith, 1992.

43. Kosslyn, 1980; Kosslyn, 1994; Pinker,
1984b; Pinker, 1997, chap. 4.

44. Kosslyn, 1980; Pinker. 1997, chap. 5.

45. Chase & Simon. 1973.

46. Dennett, 1991, pp. 56-57.

47. A. Gopnik, "Black studies," New Yorker,
December 5,1994, pp. 138-139.

Chapter 13: Out of Our Depths

1. Caramazza & Shelton, 1998; Gallistel,
2000; Gardner, 1983; Hirschfeld & Gelman,
1994; Keil, 1989; Pinker, 1997, chap. 5; Tooby &
Cosmides, 1992.

2. Spelke, 1995.

3. Atran, 1995;Atran, 1998; Gelman, Coley.
& Gottfried, 1994; Keil. 1995.

4. Bloom. 1996; Keil, 1989.

5. Gallistel, 1990; Kosslyn, 1994.

6. Butterworth. 1999; Dehaene, 1997;
Devlin, 2000; Geary, 1994; Lakoff & Nunez,
2000 .

7. Cosmides & Tooby, 1996; Gigerenzer,
1997; Kahneman & Tversky, 1982.

8. Braine, 1994; Iackendoff, 1990; Macna-
rnara & Reyes, 1994; Pinker, 1989.

9. Pinker, 1994; Pinker, 1999.

10. Quoted in Ravitch, 2000, p. 388.

11. McGuinness, 1997.

12. Geary, 1994; Geary. 1995.

13. Carey. 1986; Carey & Spelke, 1994; Gard¬
ner, 1983; Gardner, 1999; Geary, 1994; Geary,
1995; Geary, in press.

14. Carey. 1986; McCloskey, 1983.

15. Gardner, 1999.

16. McGuinness, 1997.

17. Dehaene et al., 1999.

18. Bloom, 1994.

19. Pinker, 1990.

20. Carey & Spelke, 1994.

21. Geary, 1995; Geary, in press; Harris,
1998a.

22. Green, 2001, chap. 2.

23. S.G. Stolberg, "Reconsidering embryo
research," New York Times, July 1,2001.

24. Brock, 1993, p. 372, n. 14 p. 385; Glover,
1977; Tooley, 1972; Warren, 1984.

25. Green, 2001.

26. R. Bailey, "Dr. Strangelunch, or: Why we

450/Notes to Pages 198-229

should learn to stop worrying and love genet¬
ically modified food;' Reason, January 2001.

27. "EC-sponsored research on safety of ge¬
netically modified organisms-A review of re¬
sults:' Report EUR 19884, October 2001,
European Union Office for Publications,

28. Ames, Profet, & Gold, 1990.

29. Ames, Profet, & Gold, 1990.

30. E. Schlosser, "Why McDonald's fries taste
so good," AtlanticMonthly, January 2001.

31. Ahnet al., 2001; Frazer, 1890/1996:
Rozin, 1996; Rozin, Markwith, & Stoess, 1997;
P. Stevens, 2001 (but see also M. Stevens,

2001 ).

32. Rozin & Fallon, 1987.

33. Ahn et al., 2001.

34. Rozin, 1996; Rozin & Fallon, 1987;

Rozin, Markwith, & Stoess, 1997.

35. Rozin, 1996.

36. Mayr, 1982.

37. Ames, Profet, & Gold, 1990; Lewis, 1990;
G. Gray & D. Ropeik, "What, me worry?"
Boston Globe, November 11,2001, p. E8.

38. Marks&Nesse, 1994; Seligman, 1971.

39. Slovic, Fischof, & Lichtenstein, 1982.

40. Sharpe, 1994.

41. Cosmides & Tooby, 1996; Gigerenzer,
1991; Gigerenzer, 1997; Pinker, 1997, chap. 5.

42. Hoffrage et al., 2000; Tversky & Kahne-
man, 1973.

43. Slovic, Fischof, & Lichtenstein, 1982.

44. Tooby & DeVore, 1987.

45. Fiske, 1992.

46. Cosmides & Tooby, 1992.

47. Sowell. 1980.

48. Sowell, 1980; Sowell, 1996.

49. Sowell, 1994; Sowell, 1996.

50. R. Radford (writing in 1945), quoted in
Sowell, 1994, p. 57.

51. From "The figure ofthe youth as virile
poet"; Stevens, 1965.

52. [ackendoff 1987; Pinker, 1997; Pinker,
1999.

53. Bailey, 2000.

54. Sen, 1984.

55. Simon, 1996.

56. Bailey,2000; Romer, 1991; Romer &Nel-
son, 1996; P. Romer, "Ideas and things," Econo¬
mist, September 11, 1993.

57. Romer & Nelson, 1996.

58. Quoted in M. Kumar, "Quantum reality;'
Prometheus, 2, pp. 20-21, 1999.

59. Quoted in M. Kumar, "Quantum reality;'
Prometheus, 2, pp. 20-21, 1999.

60. Quoted in Dawkins, 1998, p. 50.

61. McGinn, 1993; McGinn, 1999; Pinker,
1997, chap. 8.

Chapter 14: The Many Roots of Our
Suffering

1. Trivers, 1976.

2. Trivers, 1971; Trivers, 1972; Trivers, 1974;
Trivers, 1976; Trivers, 1985.

3. Alexander, 1987; Cronin, 1992; Dawkins,
1976/1989: Ridley, 1997; Wright, 1994.

4. Hamilton, 1964; Trivers, 1971; Trivers,
1972; Trivers, 1974; Williams, 1966.

5. "Renewing American Civilization," a talk
presented at Reinhardt College, January 7,

1995.

6. Chagnon, 1988; Daly, Salmon, & Wilson,
1997; Fox, 1984; Mount, 1992;Shoumatoff,
1985.

7. Chagnon, 1992; Daly, Salmon, & Wilson,
1997; Daly &Wilson, 1988; Gaulin &Mcliur-
ney, 2001, pp. 321-329.

8. Burnstein, Crandall, & Kitayama, 1994;
Petrinovich, O'Neill, & Jorgensen, 1993.

9. Petrinovich, O'Neill. & Jorgensen. 1993;
Singer, 1981.

10. Masters, 1989, pp. 207-208.

11. Quoted in J. Muravchick, "Socialism's
last stand:' Commentary, March 2002,

pp. 47-53, quotation from p. 51.

12. Broadcast on Radio Free LA, January
1997, www.radiofreela.com. Transcript avail¬
able at www.zmag.orglchomsky/rage or as a
cached page on www.google.com.

13. Daly, Salmon, & Wilson, 1997; Mount,
1992.

14. Johnson, Ratwik, & Sawyer, 1987;
Salmon, 1998.

15. Fiske, 1992.

16. Fiske, 1992, p. 698.

17. Trivers, 1974; Trivers, 1985.

18. Agrawal, Brodie, & Brown, 2001; God-
fray, 1995; Trivers, 1985.

19. Haig, 1993.

20. Daly & Wilson, 1988; Hrdy, 1999.

21. Hrdy, 1999.

22. Trivers, 1976; Trivers, 1981.

23. Trivers, 1985.

24. Harris, 1998a; Plomin & Daniels, 1987;
Rowe, 1994; Sulloway, 1996; Turkheimer, 2000.

25. Trivers, 1985, p. 159.

26. Used as the epigraph to Judith Rich Har¬
ris's The nurture assumption.

21. Dunn & Plomin, 1990.

28. Hrdy, 1999.

29. Daly & Wilson, 1988; Wilson, 1993.

30. Wilson, 1993.

31. Trivers, 1972; Trivers, 1985.

32. Blum, 1997; Buss, 1994; Geary, 1998;
Ridley, 1993; Symons, 1979.

Notes to Pages 229-252 / 451

33. Buss, 1994: Kenrick et al., 1993: Salmon
& Symons, 2001: Symons, 1979.

34. Buss, 2000.

35. Alexander, 1987.

36. Brown, 1991: Symons, 1979.

37. K. Kelleher, "When students'hook up:
someone inevitably gets let down;’ LosAngeles
Times, August 13, 2001.

38. Symons, 1979.

39. Daly, Salmon, & Wilson, 1997.

40. Wilson & Daly, 1992.

41. Ridley, 1997. See also Lewontin, 1990.

42. Rose & Rose, 2000.

43. Fiske, 1992.

44. Axelrod, 1984:Daw kins, 1976/1989;Rid-
ley, 1997: Trivers, 1971.

45. Cosmides&Tooby. 1992; Frank,
Gilovich, & Regan, 1993: Gigerenzer & Flug,
1992: Kanwisher & Moscovitch, 2000; Mealey,
Daood, & Krage, 1996.

46. Yinon & Dovrat, 1987.

47. Gaulin & McBurney, 2001, pp. 329-338;
Flaidt.in press; Trivers, 1971, pp. 49-54.

48. Fehr & Gachter,2000; Gintis, 2000; Price,
Cosmides, & Tooby, 2002.

49. Ridley, 1997, p. 84.

50. Fehr &Gachter, 2000: Gaulin & McBur¬
ney, 2001, pp. 333-335.

51. Fehr & Gachter, 2000; Ridley, 1997.

52. Williams, Harkins, & Latane, 1981.

53. Klaw, 1993; McCord, 1989: Muravchik,
2002: Spann, 1989.

54. J. Muravchik, "Socialism's last stand;'
Commentary, March 2002, pp. 47-53, quota¬
tion from p. 53.

55. Fiske, 1992.

56. Cashdan, 1989; Cosmides & Tooby, 1992:
Eibl-Eibesfeldt, 1989; Fiske, 1992: Hawkes,
O'Connell, & Rogers, 1997: Kaplan, Hill, &
Hurtado, 1990; Ridley, 1997.

57. Ridley, 1997, p. Ill.

58. Jiinger, 1997, p. 76.

59. Cited in Williams, 1966, p. 116.

60. Williams, 1966.

61. Fehr, Fischbacher, & Gachter, in press:
Gintis, 2000.

62. Nunney, 1998: Reeve, 2000; Trivers, 1998;
Wilson & Sober. 1994.

63. Williams, 1988, pp. 391-392.

64. Frank, 1988; Hirshleifer, 1987; Trivers,
1971.

65. Hare, 1993; Lykken, 1995: Mealey, 1995.

66. On the heritability of antisocial traits, see
Bock & Goode, 1996; Deater-Deckard &
Plornin, 1999; Krueger. Hicks, & McGue, 2001:
Lykken, 1995; Mealey, 1995; Rushton et al.,
1986. Regarding altruism, one study failed to
find that it is heritable (Krueger. Hicks, &

McGue, 20011; another study, with twice as
many subjects, found it to be substantially her¬
itable (Rushton et al.. 1986).

67. Miller,2000b.

68. Tooby & Cosmides, 1990.

69. Axelrod, 1984; Dawkins, 1976/1989;
Nowak, May, & Sigmund, 1995; Ridley, 1997.

70. Dugatkin, 1992; Harpending & Sobus,
1987; Mealey, 1995; Rice, 1997.

71. Rice, 1997.

72.. Lalumiere, Harris, & Rice, 2001.

73. M. Kakutani, "The strange case of the
writer and the criminal:’ New York TimesBook
Review, September 20, 1981.

74. S. McGraw, "Some used their second
chance at life; others squandered it:' The Record
(BergenCounty, N.J.), October 12, 1998.

75. Rice, 1997.

76. Trivers, 1976.

77. Goleman, 1985: Greenwald, 1988: Krebs &
Denton, 1997; Lockard & Paulhaus, 1988; Rue,
1994; Taylor, 1989; Trivers, 1985; Wright. 1994.

78. Nesse & Lloyd, 1992.

79. Gazzaniga, 1998.

80. Damasio, 1994, p. 68.

81. Babcock & Loewenstein, 1997; Rue, 1994;
Taylor, 1989.

82. Aronson, 1980: Festinger, 1957; Green¬
wald, 1988.

83. Haidt, 2001.

84. Dutton, 2001, p. 209; Fox, 1989; Hogan,
1997; Polti, 1921/1977; Storey, 1996, pp. 110,
142.

85. Steiner, 1984, p.l.

86. Steiner, 1984, p. 231.

87. Steiner, 1984, pp. 300-301.

88. Symons, 1979, p. 271.

89. D. Symons, personal communication,

July 30, 2001.

Chapter 15: The Sanctimonious Animal

1. Alexander, 1987; Haidt, in press; Krebs,
1998; Trivers, 1971: Wilson, 1993; Wright,

1994.

2. Haidt, Koller. & Dias, 1993.

3. Haidt, 2001.

4. Haidt, in press.

5. Shweder et al., 1997.

6. Haidt, in press; Rozin, 1997; Rozin,
Markwith, & Stoess, 1997.

7. Glendon, 2001; Sen, 2000.

8. Cronk, 1999: Sommers, 1998; Wilson,
1993; C. Sommers, 1998, "Why Johnny can't
tell right from wrong:’ American Outlook,
Summer 98, pp. 45-47.

9. D. Symons, personal communication,

July 26, 2001.

452/Notes to Pages 252-273

10. Etcoff,1999.

11. Glover, 1999.

12. 1. Kass, "The wisdom of repugnance;'
New Republic, June 2, 1997.

13. Rozin, 1997; Rozin, Markwith, &Stoess,
1997.

14. Tetlock, 1999; Tetlock et ah, 2000.

15. Tetlock,1999.

16. Tetlock et ah, 2000.

17. Hume, 1739/2000.

18. I. Buruma, Review of Ian Kershaw’s
Hitler 1936-45: Nemesis, New York Times Book
Review, December 10, 2000, p. 13.

PART V: HOT BUTTONS

1. Haidt & Hersh, 2001; Tetlock, 1999; Tet¬
lock et al., 2000.

2. Haidt & Hersh, 2001; Tetlock, 1999; Tet¬
lock et al., 2000.

Chapter 16: Politics

1. From lolanthe.

2. Personal communication, D. Lykken,
April 11,2001. Other estimates of the heri-
tability of conservative attitudes are typically
in the range of.4 to.5: Bouchard et al., 1990;
Eaves, Eysenck, & Martin, 1989; Holden, 1987;
Martin et al., 1986; Plomin et al., 1997, p. 206;
Scarr&Weinberg, 1981.

3. Tesser, 1993.

4. Wilson, 1994, pp. 338-339.

5. Masters, 1982; Masters, 1989.

6. Dawkins, 1976/1989; Williams, 1966.

7. Boyd & Silk, 1996; Ridley, 1997; Trivers,
1985.

8. Sowell,1987.

9. Sowell,1995b.

10. From the preface to On the rocks: A polit-
icalfantasy in two acts.

11. Smith, 1759/1976, pp. 233-234.
iz. Burke, 1790/1967, p. 93.

13. Quoted in E. M. Kennedy, "Tribute to
Senator Robert F. Kennedy," June 8, 1968,
www.jfklibrary.org/e060868.htm.

14. Hayek, 1976, pp. 64, 33.

15. Quoted in Sowell, 1995, pp. 227,112.

16. " If the law supposes that ... the law is a
ass-a idiot" (from OliverTwist).

17. Quoted in Sowell, 1995, p. 11.

18. Hayek,1976.

19. This is a point of contact with an alterna¬
tive theory of the psychological underpinnings
of the left-right divide proposed by the linguist
George Lakoff: that the left believes that gov¬
ernment should act like a nurturant parent.

whereas the right believes it should act like a
strict parent; see Lakoff, 1996.

20. See Chapter 14, and also Burnstein,
Crandall, & Kitayama, 1994; Chagnon, 1992;
Daly, Salmon, & Wilson, 1997; Daly & Wilson,
1988; Fox, 1984; Gaulin & McBurney, 2001,
pp. 321-329; Mount, 1992; Petrinovich,
O’Neill, & Jorgensen, 1993; Shoumatoff, 1985.

21. See Chapter 14, and also Bowles & Gin-
tis, 1999; Cosmides&Tooby, 1992; Fehr.
Fischbacher, & Gachter, in press; Fehr &
Gachter, 2000; Fiske, 1992; Gaulin & McBur¬
ney, 2001, pp. 333-335; Gintis, 2000; Klaw,
1993; McCord, 1989; Muravchik, 2002; Price,
Cosmides, &Tooby, 2002; Ridley, 1997;

Spann, 1989; Williams, Harkins, & Latane,
1981.

22. See Chapters 3 and 17, especially the ref¬
erences in notes 39, 52, 53, 72, 73, and 74 in
Chapter 3, and notes 42, 43, and 45 in Chap¬
ter 17.

23. Brown, 1991; Brown, 1985; Sherif, 1966;
Tajfel,1981.

24. See Chapters 3 and 19, and also Bou¬
chard, 1994; Neisser et al., 1996; Plomin et al.,
2001 .

25. See Chapter 14, and also Aronson, 1980;
Festinger, 1957; Gazzaniga, 1998; Greenwald,
1988; Nesse & Lloyd, 1992; Wright, 1994.

26. SeeChapter 15, and also Haidt, in press;
Haidt, Koller, & Dias, 1993; Petrinovich,
O'Neill, 8; Jorgensen, 1993; Rozin, Markwith,
&Stoess, 1997; Shwederet al., 1997; Singer,
1981; Tetlock, 1999; Tetlock et al., 2000.

27. Sowell, 1987.

28. Marx & Engels, 1844/1988.

29. Quoted in Singer, 1999, p. 4.

30. Bullock, 1991; Chirot, 1994;Conquest,
2000; Courtois et al.. 1999; Glover, 1999.

31. Quoted in J.Getlin, "Natural wonder: At
heart, Edward Wilson’s an ant man;’ LosAnge-
les Times, October 21, 1994, p, £1.

32. Federalist Papers No. 51,Rossiter, 1961,
p.322.

33. Bailyn, 1967/1992; Maier, 1997.

34. Lutz, 1984.

35. McGinnis, 1996; McGinnis, 1997.

36. Federalist Papers No. 10, Rossiter, 1961,
p.78.

37. Quoted in McGinnis, 1997, p. 236.

38. Federalist Papers No. 72, Rossiter. 1961,
p.437.

39. Federalist Papers No. 51, Rossiter, 1961,
p.322.

40. Federalist Papers No. 51, Rossiter, 1961,
pp.331-332.

41. From Helvedius No.4, quoted in McGin¬
nis, 1997, p. 130.

Notes to Pages 273-298 / 453

42. Boehm, 1999; de Waal, 1998; Dunbar,

1998.

43. Singer, 1999, p. 5.

44. 1. Arnhart, M. J. Belie, & W. A. Dembski,
"Conservatives, Darwin, and design: An ex¬
change," FirstThings, 107, November 2000,
pp.23-31.

45. For arguments similar to Singer's, see
Brociner, 2001.

46. Singer, 1999, p. 6.

47. Singer, 1999, pp. 8-9.

48. Chomsky, 1970, p. 22.

49. See Barsky, 1997; Chomsky, 1988a.

50. Chomsky, 1975, p. 131.

51. Trivers, 1981.

52. A. Wooldridge, "Bell Curve liberals:' New
Republic, February 27, 1995.

53. Herrnstein & Murray. 1994, chap. 22. See
also Murray's afterword in the 1996 paperback
edition.

54. Gigerenzer & Selten, 2001; Jones, 2001;
Kahneman & Tversky, 1984; Thaler, 1994;
Tversky & Kahneman, 1974.

55. Akerlof. 1984; Daly & Wilson, 1994;
Jones, 2001; Rogers, 1994.

56. Frank. 1999; Frank, 1985.

57. Bowles & Gintis, 1998; Bowles & Gintis,

1999.

58. Gintis, 2000.

59. Wilkinson, 2000.

60. Daly & Wilson, 1988; Daly, Wilson. &
Vasdev, 2001; Wilson &Daly, 1997.

Chapter 17: Violence

1. Quoted by R. Cooper in "The long
peace -.'Prospect, April 1999.

2. National Defense Council Foundation,
Alexandria, Va., www.ndcf.orglindex.htm.

3. Bamforth, 1994; Chagnon, 1996; Daly &
Wilson, 1988; Ember, 1978; Ghiglieri, 1999;
Gibbons, 1997; Keeley, 1996; Kingdon, 1993;
Knauft, 1987; Krech, 1994; ICrech, 1999;
Wrangham & Peterson, 1996.

4. Keeley, 1996; Walker, 2001.

5. Gibbons, 1997; Holden, 2000.

6. Fernandez-Ialvo et al., 1996.

7. FBI Uniform Crime Reports1999:
www.fbLgov/ucr/99cius.htm.

8. Seville, 1990.

9. Ortega y Gasser, 1932/1985, epilogue.

10. New York Times, June 13, 1999.

11. Paul Billings, quoted in B.H. Kevles &
D.J. Kevles,"Scapegoat biology," Discover, Oc¬
tober 1997, pp. 59-62, quotation from p. 62.

12. B.H. Kevles & D.J. Kevles,"Scapegoatbi¬
ology:'Discover, October 1997, pp. 59-62, quo¬
tation from p. 62.

13. Daphne White, quoted in M. Wilkinson,
"Parent group lists 'dirty dozen' toys:' Boston
Globe, December 5, 2000, p. AS.

14. H. Spivak & D. Prothrow-Stith, "The
next tragedy of Jonesboro," Boston Globe, April
'5,1998.

15. C. Burrell, "Study of inmates cites abuse
factor," Associated Press, April 27, 1998.

16. G. Kane, "Violence as a cultural impera¬
tive," BostonSunday Globe, October 6, 1996.

17. Quoted in A. Flint, "Some see bombing's
roots in a US culture of conflict Boston Globe,
June 1, 1995.

18. A. Flint, "Some see bombing's roots in a
US culture of conflict:' Boston Globe, June 1,

1995.

19. M. Zuckoff, "More murders, more de¬
bate," BostonGlobe, July 31,1999.

20. A. Diamant, "What's the matter with
men?" BostonGlobeMagazine.March 14,

1993.

21. Mesquida & Wiener, 1996.

22. Freedman, 2002.

23. Fischoff, 1999; Freedman, 1984; Freed¬
man, 1996; Freedman, 2002; Renfrew, 1997.

24. Charlton, 1997.

25. J. Q. Wilson, "Hostility in America:'Aw
Republic, August 25,1997, pp. 38-41.

26. Nisbett & Cohen, 1996.

27. E. Marshal, "The shots heard 'round the
world:' Science, 289,2000, pp. 570-574.

28. Wakefield, 1992.

29. M. Enserink, "Searching for the mark of
Cain:' Science, 289,2000, pp. 575-579; quota¬
tion from p. 579.

30. Clark, 1970, p. 220.

31. Daly & Wilson, 1988, p. ix.

32. Shipman, 1994, p. 252.

33. E. Marshal, "A sinister plot or victim of
politics?" Science, 289, 2000, p. 571.

34. Shipman, 1994, p. 243.

35. Quoted in R. Wright, "The biology of vi¬
olence:' New Yorker, March 13, 1995, pp.

68-77; quotation from p. 69.

36. Daly & Wilson, 1988.

37. Daly&Wilson, 1988; Rogers, 1994; Wil¬
son & Herrnstein, 1985.

38. Quoted by Frederick Goodwin in R.
Wright, "The biology ofviolence:' New Yorker,
March 13, 1995, p. 70.

39. C. Holden, "The violence of the lambs:'
Science, 289, 2000, pp. 580-581.

40. Hare, 1993; Lykken, 1995; Rice, 1997.

41. Ghiglieri, 1999; Wrangham & Peterson,

1996.

42. Davidson, Putnam, & Larson, 2000; Ren¬
frew, 1997.

43. Geary, 1998, pp. 226-227; Sherif, 1966.

454/Notes to Pages 298-316

44. R. Tremblay, quoted in C. Holden, "The
violence of the lambs," Science, 289, 2000, pp.
580-581.

45. Buss & Duntley, in press; Kenrick &
Sheets, 1994.

46. Hobbes, 1651/1957, p.185.

47. Dawkins, 1976/1989, p. 66.

48. Bueno de Mesquita, 1981.

49. Trivers, 1972.

50. Chagnon, 1992; Daly & Wilson, 1988;
Keeley, 1996.

51. Daly&Wilson, 1988,p. 163.

52. Rogers, 1994; Wilson & Daly, 1997.

53. Wilson &Herrnstein, 1985.

54. Mesquida & Wiener, 1996.

55. Singer, 1981.

56. Wright,2000.

57. Glover, 1999.

58. Zimbardo, Maslach, & Haney, 2000.

59. Quoted in Glover, 1999, p. 53.

60. Quoted in Glover, 1999,pp. 37-38.

61. Bourke, 1999, pp. 63-64; Graves, 1992;
Spiller, 1988.

62. Bourke, 1999; Glover, 1999; Horowitz,
2001 .

63. Daly&Wilson, 1988;Glover, 1999;
Schelling, 1960.

64. Chagnon, 1992; Daly & Wilson, 1988;
Wrangham & Peterson, 1996.

65. Van den Berghe, 1981.

66. Epstein, 1994; Epstein &Axtell, 1996;
Richardson, 1960; Saperstein, 1995.

67. Chagnon,,1988;Chagnon, 1992.

68. Glover, 1999.

69. Vasquez, 1992.

70. Rosen, 1992.

71. Wrangham, 1999.

72. Daly&Wilson, 1988.

73. Daly&Wilson, 1988, pp. 225-226.

74. Daly&Wilson, 1988;Frank, 1988;
Schelling, 1960.

75. Brown, 1985; Horowitz, 2001.

76. Daly&Wilson, 1988.

77. Daly&Wilson, 1988; Fox & Zawitz,
2000; Nisbett & Cohen, 1996.

78. Daly&Wilson, 1988,p. 127.

79. Daly&Wilson, 1988,p.229.

80. Chagnon. 1992; Daly & Wilson, 1988;
Frank, 1988.

81. Nisbett & Cohen, 1996.

82. Nisbett & Cohen, 1996.

83. E. Anderson, "The code of the streets;'
Atlantic Monthly, May 1994, pp. 81-94.

84. See also Patterson, 1997.

85. E.Anderson, "The code ofthe streets;'
Atlantic Monthly, May 1994, pp. 81-94, quota¬
tion from p. 82.

86. Quoted in 1. Helmuth, "Has America's

tide of violence receded for good?" Science,

289, 2000, pp. 582-585, quotation from p. 582.

87. 1. Helmuth, "Has America's tide ofvio-
lence receded for good?" Science, 289, 2000,
pp. 582-585, quotation from p. 583.

88. Wilkinson, 2000; Wilson & Daly, 1997.

89. Harris, 1998a, pp. 212-213.

90. Hobbes, 1651/1957, p. 190.

91. Hobbes, 1651/1957, p. 223.

92. Fry, 2000.

93. Daly&Wilson, 1988;Keeley, 1996.

94. Daly&Wilson, 1988;Nisbett & Cohen,
1996.

95. Daly&Wilson, 1988.

96. Daly&Wilson, 1988.

97. Wilson & Herrnstein, 1985.

98. 1. Helmuth, "Has America's tide of vio¬
lence receded for good?" Science, 289, 2000;
Kelling & Sousa, 2001.

99. Time, October 17,1969, p.47.

100. Kennedy, 1997..

101. National Defense Council Foundation,
Alexandria, Va., www.ndef.org/index.htm.

102. Quoted by Glover, 1999, p. 227.

103. Horowitz, 2001; Keegan, 1976.

104. C. Nickerson, "Canadians remain gun-
shy of Americans -.'Boston Globe, February 11.
2001 .

105. Quoted in Wright, 2000, p. 61.

106. Chagnon, 1988; Chagnon, 1992.

107. Axelrod, 1984.

108. Glover, 1999, p. 159.

109. Glover, 1999, p. 202.

110. Axelrod, 1984; Ridley, 1997.

111. Glover, 1999,pp. 231-232.

112. M. J. Wilkinson, personal communica¬
tion, October 29, 2001; Wilkinson, in press.

113. SeeChapters 3 and 13,and alsoFodor &
Pylyshyn, 1988;Miller,Galanter. & Pribram,
1960;Pinker, 1997,chap. 2;Pinker, 1999,chap. 1.

Chapter 18: Gender

1. Iaggar, 1983.

2. Quoted in Iaggar, 1983,p. 27.

3. J. N. Wilford, "Sexes equal on South Sea
isle" New York Times, March 29, 1994.

4. 1. Tye, "Girls appear to be dosing aggres¬
sion gap with boys:' Boston Globe, March 26,
1998.

5. M. Zoll, "What about the boys?" Boston
Globe, April 23, 1998.

6. Quoted in Young, 1999, p. 247.

7. Crittenden, 1999;Shalit, 1999.

8. 1. Kass,"The end of courtship," Public
Interest, 126, Winter 1997.

9. Patai,1998.

10. Grant, 1993; Iaggar, 1983;Tong, 1998.

Notes to Pages 316 - 341/455

11. Sommers, 1994. See also Iaggar, 1983.

12. Quoted in Sommers, 1994, p. 22.

13. Gilligan, 1982.

14. Jaffe & Hyde, 2000; Sommers, 1994,
chap. 7; Walker, 1984.

15. Belenkyet al„ 1986.

16. Denfeld, 1995; Kaminer, 1990; Lehrman,
1997; McElroy, 1996; Paglia, 1992; Patai, 1998;
Patai & Koertge, 1994; Sommers, 1994; Taylor,
1992; Young, 1999.

17. Sommers, 1994.

18. Denfeld, 1995; Lehrman, 1997; Roiphe,
1993; Walker, 1995.

19. S. Boxer, "One casualty of the women's
movement: Feminism." New York Times, De¬
cember 14, 1997.

20. C. Paglia, "Crying wolf;' Salon, February
7,2001.

21. Patai, 1998; Sommers, 1994.

22. Trivers, 1976; Trivers, 1981; Trivers, 1985.

23. Trivers & Willard, 1973.

24. Jensen, 1998, chap. 13.

25. Blum, 1997; Eagly, 1995; Geary, 1998;
Halpern, 2000; Kimura, 1999.

26. Salmon & Symons, 2001; Symons, 1979.

27. Daly&Wilson, 1988. Surgery anecdote
from Barry, 1995.

28. Geary, 1998; Maccoby & Jacklin, 1987.

29. Geary, 1998; Halpern, 2000; Kimura,
1999.

30. Blum, 1997; Geary, 1998; Halpern, 2000;
Hedges & Nowell, 1995; Lubinski & Benbow,
1992.

31. Hedges & Nowell, 1995; Lubinski & Ben¬
bow, 1992.

32. Blum, 1997; Geary, 1998; Halpern, 2000;
Kimura, 1999.

33. Blum, 1997; Geary, 1998; Halpern, 2000;
Kimura, 1999.

34. Provine, 1993.

35. Hrdy,1999.

36. Fausto-Sterling, 1985, pp. 152-153.

37. Brown, 1991.

38. Buss, 1999; Geary, 1998; Ridley, 1993;
Symons, 1979; Trivers, 1972.

39. Daly & Wilson, 1983; Geary, 1998;
Hauser, 2000.

40. Geary, 1998; Silverman & Eals, 1992.

41. Gibbons, 2000.

42. Blum, 1997; Geary, 1998; Halpern, 2000;
.Kimura, 1999.

43. Blum, 1997; Geary, 1998; Gur & Gur, in
press; Gur et al.. 1999; Halpern, 2000; Jensen,
1998; Kimura, 1999; Neisseret al., 1996.

44. Dabbs & Dabbs, 2000; Geary, 1998;
Halpern, 2000; Kimura, 1999; Sapoisky, 1997.

45. A. Sullivan, "Testosterone power;'
Women's Quarterly, Summer 2000.

46. Kimura, 1999.

47. Blum, 1997; Gangestad & Thornhill,

1998.

48. Blum, 1997; Geary, 1998; Halpern, 2000;
Kimura, 1999.

49. Symons, 1979, chap. 9.

50. Reiner,2000.

51. Quoted in Halpern, 2000, p. 9.

52. Quoted in Colapinto, 2000.

53. Colapinto, 2000; Diamond & Sigmund-
son, 1997.

54. Skuse et al., 1997.

55. Barkley et al., 1977; Harris, 1998a; Lytton
&Romney, 1991; Maccoby & Jacklin, 1987.

56. B. Friedan, "The future of feminism;'

Free Inquiry, Summer 1999.

57. "Land of plenty: Diversity as America's
competitive edge in science, engineering, and
technology;' Report of the Congressional
Commission on the Advancement ofWomen
and Minorities in Science, Engineering, and
Technology Development, September 2000.

58. J. Alper, "The pipeline is leaking women
all the way along;' Science, 260, April 16, 1993;

J. Mervis, "Efforts to boost diversity face per¬
sistent problems;' Science, 284, June 11, 1999; J.
Mervis, "Diversity: Easier said than done;' Sci¬
ence, 289, March 16,2000; J. Mervis, "NSF
searches for right way to help women:' Science,
289, July 21, 2000; J. Mervis, "Gender equity:
NSF program targets institutional change;' Sci¬
ence, 291, July 21,2001.

59. J. Mervis, "Efforts to boost diversity face
persistent problems;' Science, 284, June 11,

1999, p.1757.

60. P. Healy, "Faculty shortage: Women in
sciences;' Boston Globe, January 31,2001.

61. C. Holden, "Parity as a goal sparks bitter
battle;' Science, 289, July 21,2000, p. 380.

62. Quoted in Young, 1999, pp. 22, 34-35.

63. Estrich, 2000; Furchtgott-Roth & Stolba,
1999; Goldin, 1990; Gottfredson, 1988; Haus-
man, 1999; Kleinfeld, 1999; Lehrman, 1997;
Lubinski & Benbow, 1992; Roback, 1993;
Schwartz, 1992; Young, 1999.

64. Browne, 1998; Furchtgott-Roth & Stolba,
1999; Goldin. 1990.

65. In a random sample of 100 members of
the International Association for the Study of
Child Language, I counted 75 women and 25
men. The Stanford Child Language Research
Forum lists 18 past keynote speakers on its web
site (csli.stanford.edu/~clrf/history.html); 15
women and 3 men.

66. Browne, 1998; Furchtgott-Roth & Stolba,
1999; Goldin, 1990; Gottfredson, 1988; Klein¬
feld, 1999; Roback, 1993; Young, 1999.

67. Lubinski & Benbow, 1992.

456/Notes to Pages 341-356

68. See Browne. 1998, and the references in
note 63.

69. Buss, 1992; Ellis, 1992.

70. Hrdy, 1999.

71. Browne, 1998; Hrdy, 1999.

72. Roback,1993.

73. Becker, 1991.

74. Furchtgott-Roth & Stolba, 1999.

75. Quoted in C. Young, "Sex and science,”
Salon, April 12,2001.

76. Quoted in C. Holden, "Parity as a goal
sparks bitter battle;' Science, 289, July 21,2000.

77. Quoted in C. Holden, "Parity as a goal
sparks bitter battle;' Science, 289, July 21,2000.

78. Kleinfeld,1999.

79. National Science Foundation, Women,
Minorities, and Persons with Disabilities in Sci¬
ence and Engineering: 1998, www.nsf.gov/
sbe/srs/nsf99338.

80. Thornhill & Palmer, 2000.

81. "Report on the situation ofhuman rights
in the territory of the former Yugoslavia,"

1993. United Nations Document
E/CNA/1993/50.

82. J.E. Beals, "Ending the silence on sexual
violence;' Boston Globe, April 10,2000.

83. R. Hayner, "Violence against women;'
Boston Globe, October 22, 2000.

84. Brownmiller, 1975, p.14.

85. Young, 1999, p. 139.

86. McElroy, 1996.

87. McElroy, 1996.

88. Thiessen & Young, 1994.

89. Dworkin, 1993.

90. J. Tooby & 1. Cosmides, "Reply to Jerry
Coyne; 1 www.psych.ucsb.edu/research/cep/tnr.

html.

91. Gordon & Riger, 1991, p.47.

92. Rose & Rose, 2000, p. 139.

93. M. Wertheim, "Born to rape?" Salon,
February 29, 2000.

94. G. Miller, "Why men rape;' Evening Stan¬
dard, March 6, 2000, p. 53.

95. Symons, 1979; Thornhill & Palmer,

2000 .

96. Jones, 1999. See also Check & Malamuth,
1985; Ellis & Beattie, 1983; Symons, 1979;
Thornhill & Palmer, 2000.

97. Gottschall & Gottschall, 2001.

98. Jones, 1999, p. 890.

99. Bureau of Justice Statistics, www.ojp.
usdoj.gov/bjs.

100. Quoted in A. Humphreys, "Lawyers may
use genetics study in rape defense;' National
Povf(Canada), January 22,2000, p. A8.

101. Quoted in Jones. 1999.

102. Paglia, 1990, pp. 51,57.

103. McElroy, 1996.

104. J. Phillips, "Exploring inside to live on
the outside;' Boston Globe, March 21,1999.

105. S. Satel, "The patriarchy made me do it,"
Women's Freedom Newsletter, 5, September/
October 1998.

Chapter 19: Children

1. Turkheimer, 2000.

2. Goldberg, 1968;Janda, 1998; Neisser et
al.,1996.

3. Jensen, 1971.

4. Plomin et al.,2001.

5. Bouchard, 1994; Bouchard et al., 1990;
Bouchard, 1998; Loehlin, 1992; Plomin, 1994;
Plomin et al., 2001.

6. Plomin et al.,2001.

7. McLearn et al., 1997; Plomin, Owen, &
McGuffin, 1994.

8. Bouchard, 1994; Bouchard et al., 1990;
Bouchard, 1998; Loehlin, 1992; Lykken et al.,
1992; Plomin, 1990; Plomin, 1994; Stroms-
wold.1998.

9. Plomin et al., 2001.

10. Bouchard et al„ 1990; Plomin, 1991;
Plornin, 1994; Plomin & Daniels, 1987.

11. Bouchard et al., 1990; Pedersen et al.,

1992.

12. Bouchard et al., 1990; Bouchard, 1998.

13. Scarr & Carter-Saltzman, 1979.

14. Loehlin & Nichols, 1976.

15. Bouchard, 1998; Gutknecht, Spitz, &
Carlier, 1999.

16. McGue, 1997.

17. Etcoff, 1999; Persico, Postlewaite, & Sil¬
verman, 2001.

18. Jackson & Huston, 1975.

19. Bouchard, 1994; Bouchardetal., 1990.

20. Kamin, 1974; Lewontin, Rose, & Kamin,
1984, p. 116.

21. Neisseret al., 1996; Snyderman & Roth¬
man, 1988.

22. Hunt, 1999, pp. 50-51.

23. Plomin & Daniels, 1987; Plomin etal.,
2001 .

24. Bouchard, 1994; Harris, 1998a; Plomin &
Daniels, 1987; Rowe, 1994; Turkheimer & Wal¬
dron, 2000. An example of a nonreplicated
finding is the recent claim by Krueger, Hicks, &
McGue, 2001, that altruism is affected by the
shared environment, which is contradicted by

a study by Rushton et al., 1986, which used
similar methods and a larger sample.

25. Stoolmiller, 2000.

26. Bouchard et al., 1990; Plomin & Daniels,
1987; Reiss et al., 2000; Rowe. 1994.

27. Plomin, 1991; Plomin & Daniels, 1987,
p. 6; Plomin et al.,2001.

Notes to Pages 356-380 / 457

28. Bouchard, 1994; Plomin & Daniels. 1987;
Rowe, 1994; Turkheimer, 2000; Turkheimer &
Waldron, 2000.

29. Schiitze,1987.

30. B.Singer, "Howto raise a perfect
child ... ;' Boston Globe Magazine, March 26,
2000, pp. 12-36.

31. D. Barry, "Is your kid's new best friend
named'Bessie'? Be very afraid;' Miami Herald,
October 31, 1999.

32. Harris, 1998a, chap. 2; Lytton, 1990.

33. Harris, 1998a, chap. 4; Harris, 2000b.

34. Harris, 1998a, pp. 319-320, 323.

35. Harris, 1998a; Harris, 1998b; Harris,
2000a; Harris, 2000b.

36. Harris, 1998a, chaps. 2; 3; Maccoby &
Martin, 1983.

37. Harris, 1998a, pp. 300-311.

38. Bruer, 1999, p. 5.

39. Chabris, 1999.

40. T.B . Brazelton, "To curb teenage smok¬
ing, nurture children in their earliest years,"
Boston Globe, May 21,1998.

41. Bruer, 1999.

42. Collins et al., 2000; Vandell, 2000.

43. Harris, 1995; Harris, 1998b; Harris,
2000b; Loehlin, 2001; Rowe, 2001.

44. Plomin, DeFries, & Fulker, 1988; Reiss et
al., 2000; Turkheimer &Waldron, 2000.

45. D. Reiss, quoted in A. M. Paul, "Kid stuff:
Do parents really matter?" Psychology Today,
January/February 1998, pp. 46-49, 78.

46. Sulloway, 1996.

47. Sulloway, 1995.

48. Harris, 1998a, appendix l;Harris, in
press.

49. Hrdy, 1999.

50. Dunphy, 1963.

51. Pinker, 1994, chaps. 2, 9.

52. Kosof, 1996.

53. Harris, 1998a, chaps. 9,12,13.

54. Harris, 1998a, p. 264.

55. Harris, 1998a, chap. 13; Rowe, 1994; Rut-
ter,1997.

56. Gottfredson & Hirschi, 1990; Harris,
1998a, chap. 13.

57. Harris, 1998a, chap. 8.

58. M. Wertheim, "Mindfield" (Review of S.
Pinker's How the mind works), The Australian's
ReviewofBooks, 1998.

59. O. James, "It's a free market on the nature
of nurture;’ The Independent, October 20, 1998.

60. www.philipmorrisusa.com/DisplayPage
WithTopic.asp?ID=189. See also Anheuser-
Busch’s www.beeresponsible.com/ftad/review.
htrnl.

61. J. Leo, "Parenting without a care:' US
Newsand World Report, September 21.1998.

62. Quoted in J. Leo, "Parenting without a
care;' USNewsand World Report, September
21,1998.

63. S. Begley,"The parent trap;’ Newsweek,
September 7, 1998, p. 54.

64. S. Begley, "The parent trap;' Newsweek,
September 7,1998, p. 54.

65. J. Kagan, "A parent's influence is peer¬
less;' Boston Globe, September 13, 1998, p.E3.

66. Harris, 1998b; Harris, 2000a; Harris,
2000b; Loehlin, 2001; Rowe, 2001.,

67. See also Miller, 1997.

68. Austad, 2000; Finch & Kirkwood, 2000.

69. Hartman, Garvik, & Hartwell, 2001; .
Waddington, 1957.

70. Harris, 1998a, pp. 78-79.

71. Quoted in B. M. Rubin, "Raising a
ruckus being a parent is difficult, but is it
necessary?" Chicago Tribune, August 31,

1998.

72. Harris, 1998a, p. 291.

73. Harris, 1998a, p. 342.

Chapter 20: The Arts

1. R. Brustein, "The decline of high cul¬
ture;' New Republic, November 3, 1997.

2. A. Kernan, Yale University Press, 1992.

3. A. Delbanco, New York ReviewofBooks,
November 4,1999.

4. R. Brustein, New Republic, November 3,

1997.

5. Conference at the Stanford University
Humanities Center, April 23, 1999.

6. G. Steiner, PN Review, 25, March-April

1999.

7. J. Engell & A. Dangcrficld, Harvard Mag¬
azine, May-June 1998, pp. 48-55, Ill.

8. A. Louch, Philosophy and Literature, 22,
April 1998, pp. 231-241.

9. C. Woodring, Columbia University Press,
1999.

10. J.M. Ellis, Yale University Press, 1997.

11. G. Wheatcroft, Prospect, August/Septem¬
ber 1998.

12. R.E. Scholes, YaleUniversity Press,

1998.

13. A. Kernan (Ed.), Princeton University
Press, 1997.

14. C. P. Freund, Reason, March 1998,
pp.33-38.

15. Quoted in Cowen, 1998, pp. 9-10.

16. J. Engell & A. Dangerfield, "Humanities
in the age of money:' Han’ard Magazine,
May-June 1998. pp. 48-55, Ill.

17. J.Engell &A. Dangerfield, "Humanities
in the age of money;' Han’ard Magazine,
May-June 1998, pp.48-55. 111.

458 / Notes to Pages 380-401

18. Cowen, 1998; N. Gillespie, "All culture,
allthe time:' Reason, April 1999, pp. 24-35.

19. Cowen, 1998.

20. Quoted in Cowen, 1998, p. 188.

21. Cowen, 1998.

22. Actually, "human character changed:'
from her essay "Character in Fiction:'

23. Crick, 1994; Gardner, 1983; Peretz,
Gagnon, & Bouchard, 1998.

24. Miller, 2000a.

25. Dutton, 2001.

26. Dissanayake, 1992; Dissanayake, 2000.

27. Pinker, 1997, chap. 8.

28. Marr, 1982; Pinker, 1997, chap. 8; Ra-
machandran & Hirstein, 1999; Shepard, 1990.
See also Gombrich. 1982/1995; Miller, 2001.

29. Pinker, 1997, chap. 8.

30. Kaplan, 1992; Orians, 1998;Orians&
Heerwgen, 1992; Wilson, 1984.

31. Wilson, 1984.

32. Etcoff, 1999; Symons, 1995; Thornhill,
1998.

33. Tooby & DeVore, 1987.

34. Abbott, 2001; Pinker, 1997.

35. Dissanayake, 1998.

36. Dissanayake, 1992.

37. Frank, 1999;Veblen, 1899/1994.

38. Zahavi & Zahavi, 1997.

39. Miller, 2000a, p. 270.

40. Bell. 1992; Wolfe, 1975; Wolfe, 1981.

41. Bourdieu, 1984.

42. From his 1757 essay "Of the standard of
taste:' quoted in Dutton, 2001, p. 206.

43. Dutton, 2001, p. 213.

44. Dutton, 1998; Komar, Melamid, &Wypi-
jewski,1997.

45. Dissanayake, 1998.

46. Dutton. 1998.

47. Lingua Franca, 2000.

48. Turner, 1997, pp.170. 174-175.

49. Etcoff 1999; Kaplan, 1992; Orians &
Fleerwgen, 1992.

50. Leslie, 1994; Schellenberg & Trehub,

1996; Storey, 1996; Zentner & Kagan, 1996.

51. Martindale, 1990.

52. Steiner, 2001.

53. Quoted in Dutton, 2000.

54. C. Darwent, "Art of staying pretty:' New
Statesman, February 13,2000.

55. Steiner, 2001.

56. Bell. 1992.

57. TheOnion, 36, September21-27,2000,p.l.

58. Wolfe, 1975. pp. 2-4.

59. J. Miller, "Is bad writing necessary?
George Orwell, Theodor Adorno, and the poli¬
tics of language:' Lingua Franca, December/
January, 2000.

60: www.cybereditions.com/aldaily/bwc.htm.

61. Steiner, 1967, preface.

62. NewYork Times, September 19,2001.

63. By the sculptor Ianine Antoni; G.
Beauchamp, "Dissing the middle class: The
view from Burns Park;' American Scholar,
Summer 1995, pp. 335-349.

64. K. Limaye, "Adieu to the Avant-Garde,"
Reason, July 1997.

65. K. Limaye, "Adieu to the Avant-Garde,"
Reason, July 1997.

66. C. Darwent, "Art of staying pretty:’ New
Statesman, February 13,2000; C. Lambert,
"The stirring of sleeping beauty,” Harvard
Magazine, September-October 1999,

pp. 46-53; K. Limaye, "Adieu to the Avant-
Garde:’ Reason, July 1997; A. Delbanco, "The
decline and fall ofliteratur e," NewYork Review
ofBooks, November 4,1999; Perloff, 1999;
Turner, 1985; Turner, 1995.

67. Abbott, 2001,; Boyd, 1998; Carroll, 1995;
Dutton, 2001:.Easterlin, Riebling, & Crews,
1993; Evans, 1998; Gottschall & Iobling, in
preparation; Hernadi, 2001; Hogan, 1997;
Steiner, 2001; Turner, 1985; Turner, 1995;
Turner, 1996.

68. Goguen, 19.99;Gombrich, 1982/1995;
Kubovy, 1986.

69. Aiello & Sloboda, 1994; Lerdahl & Jack-
endoff,1983.

70. Keyser, 1999; Keyser & Halle, 1998;
Turner. 1991; Turner, 1996; Williams, 1990.

71. Scarry, 1999.

72. Abbott, 2001.

73. A. Quart, "David Bordwell blows the
whistle on film studies:'LinguaFranca, March
2000, pp. 35-43.

74. Abbott, 2001; Aiken, 1998; Cooke &
Turner, 1999; Dissanayake, 1992; Etcoff, 1999;
Kaplan. 1992; Orians & Heerwgen, 1992;
Thornhill, 1998.

75. Teuber, 1997.

76. Behrens, 1998.

77. Quoted in Storey, 1996, p. 182.

78. A. S. Byatt, "Narrate or die," New York
Times Magazine, April 18, 1999, pp.105-107.

79. John Updike, "The tried and the
treowe," ForbesASAp, October 2, 2000,
pp. 201, 215.

80. Storey, 1996, p. 114.

PART VI: THE VOICE OF THE SPECIES

1. Degler, 1991, p. 135.

2. Dickinson, 1976.

3. Vonnegut, 1968/1998.

4. Orwell, 1949/1983, p. 205.

5. For example, Gould, 1981; Lewontin,
Rose, & Kamin, 1984, pp. ix-x.

Notes to Pages 402-426 / 459

6. Orwell, 1949/1983,p.217.

7. Orwell, 1949/1983, p. 220.

8. Orwell, 1949/1983, p. 220.

9. Orwell, 1949/1983, p. 222.

10. Twain, 1884/1983, pp. 293-295.

11. Twain, 1884/1983, p.295.

12. Twain, 1884/1983, pp. 330-331.

13. Twain, 1884/1983, p. 332.

14. Twain, 1884/1983, p. 339.

15. Singer, 1972.

16. The dialogue is condensed from Singer,
1972, pp. 68-78. and from the film adaptation.

460/Notes to Pages 427-433

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INDEX

Abbott, Jack Henry, 261-62
abortion, 227-28, 269
Abzug,Bella,353
Adam, 2

Adams, John, 145,297
Adams, Scott, 265
Addams, Chas, 46, 375
Adelson, Edward, 199,200
adoption studies, 47 - 48 , 374 ^ 376-77,
379,392

Adorno. Theodor, 415
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The
(Twain), 428-31
Aesop, 256
Afghanistan, 254, 306
Africa, 6, 66,67, 68, 152,315,321,344,
366,408,409

African Americans, 17,107. 108,217.

263,298,328-29
African Queen, The, 163
AgainstOur Will (Brownmiller),

361-62

"Against'Sociobiology'" (Gould et at),
109, 122, 132
aggression, seeviolence
agriculture. 143,237-38
Akerlof, George, 302
Alcock, John, 134, 135
Alcohol, Drug Abuse, and Mental Health
Administration, 314
Alexander, Richard, 195,253
Allen, Woody, 49, 179,244, 248, 267

altruism, 242-43, 255-61, 271, 303-4
experiments on, 256-58
reciprocity and. 255-56, 258, 260, 285,
304

American Academy of Pediatrics, 311
American Anthropological Association,
108,115

American Association for the

Advancement of Science, 111
American Medical Association, 311
American Psychological Association, 311
American Revolution, 296
Amnesty International, 307
amygdala, 44, 89,93, 123, 175,316,347
analogy, lOS, 106
seealso metaphor
Anderson, Elijah, 328
Anderson, John, 80
Anderson, Steven, 99
androgens, 347, 348
seealso testosterone
Animal Liberation (Singer), 320
animal rights, 227-28, 320
Annie Hall, 190-91
anthropology, 22-23, 38, 55, 56,101,
108,115

Antigones (Steiner), 266-67, 431
AntZ, 244, 248, 267
Apted, Michael, 373
archaeology, 55

architecture, modernist, x, 170-71,410
Ardrey, Robert, 124

Index 1491

aristocracy, 5-6, 301-2
Aristotle, 266
ArloandJanis, 163
Arnhart. Larry, 299
Art (Bell), 413

artificial intelligence, 33-34,61, 10S,

106

arts, 216-17,400-420
brain and, 405
human nature and, 404-20
modernism and, 409-13, 417-18
postmodernism and, see
postmodernism
prevalence of, 404-5
psychological roots of, 404-9. 412,
417

sexual attraction and, 407-8
three ailing areas of, 403-4
universal tastes and, 408-9
visual system and, 405, 412, 417-18
Asimov, Isaac, 133
associationism, 18-19,21, 62, 79,81
Astell, Mary, 337-38
Astonishing Hypothesis, The (Crick), 41
Atran, Scott, 230
Austad, Steven, 397
Australia, 68-69, 404
autism, 46, 62

Baby and ChildCare (Spock), 20
Baddeley, Alan, 209-10
Bailey, Ronald, 131
Baker, Mark, 38
Bakunin, Mikhail, 295, 331
Bambi,12
Barash, David, 366
Barry, Dave, 383, 425
Barthes, Roland, 208
Bates, Elizabeth, 35-36
Bauhaus, 418
Bazelon, David. 181
Beatles, the, 402
beauty, 53, 387-88, 405
denial of, 413-14
Beauvoir, Simone de, 171
Becker, Gary, 357

behavioral genetics, 45-51, Ill, 124,
134,142,413
.family effects in, 378-87
mind-matter divide and, 45-51
three laws of, 372-80, 393
unique environment in, 380-81
see also heritability
behaviorism. 19-21,40,124,170,177
Behavior of Organisms, The (Skinner),
20

Behe, Michael, 130
Bell, Clive, 413
Bell, Quentin, 407, 414
Bell Curve, The (Herrnstein and
Murray), viii, 301, 302
Benbow, Camilla, 342, 353, 356
Benedict, Ruth, 25
Benny, Jack, 278
Bentham, Jeremy, 285
Berkeley, George, 22
Berlin, Isaiah, 151, 170,287
Berra, Yogi, 322
Bethell, Tom, 130
Betzig,Laura, 342
Bever.Tom, 80

BeyondFreeclom and Dignity (Skinner),
169

Bible, 2, 128-29
Bierce, Ambrose, 240
Big Chill, The, 264
biology:

intuitive, 220
reduetionism and, 69-72
soulconceptand,224-27
biophilia, 405
birth order, 389-90
"Black Male" art exhibit, 217, 411
Black Panthers, 111,301
Blank Slate, 11, 17
origin of term.S
rise of, 16-17
see also specific topics
blind people, 94-96
Block, Ned, 11

Boas, Franz, 22,25,66-67,207
Boehm, Christopher, 298

492 / Index

Bogart, Humphrey, 163
bonobos,45
Borges, Jorge Luis, 59
Bork, Robert, 130
Born to Rebel (Sulloway), 381, 389
Boston Globe, 86,309,339,360,370,382,
394-95

Botticelli, Sandro, 408

Bouchard. Thomas, 378, 381

Bourdieu, Pierre, 407-8,413

bourgeoisie, 128, 152,157, 158,410,416

bowerbirds, 407-8

Bowles, Samuel, 303

Boyd, Brian, 417

Braceras, Jennifer, 353

Braille, 94-96

brain,21,41-45,74,83-100,423-24
anatomy of, 44
art and, 405, 412

c?gnitive neuroscience and, 41-45
complexity of, 197
corpus callosum severed in, 43
damage to,42-45,98-100, 265
development of, 83-100, 227, 386-87,
396-97

genetics and. 49, 90-94, 98
hemispheres of, 43, 99
inhibition and, 44
plasticity of, 44-45, 74, 83-100
sex differences in, 347
visual cortex of, 87-97
seealso neural plasticity
"Brain Is Wider Than the Sky,The”
(Dickinson),423-24
Brain Storm (Dooling), 176
Brando, Marlon, 375
Brasilia, 170

Brazelton, T. Berry, 386, 394
Brecht. Bertolt, 170
Breggin, Peter, 314
Breland, Keller, 20
Breland. Marian. 20
Brennan, William, 181
Britain, 16,68,71.144,296
Broca, Paul, 44
Brooks. Rodney, 61

Brown, Donald, 55, 57, 435-39
Brown, Roger, 205

Brownmiller, Susan, 361—62,363—64,
365,368

Bruer, Jon, 386-87
Bryan, William Jennings, 130
Buckley, William E, 130,262
Buddha, 163

Bueno de Mesquita. Bruce, 319
Bukharin. Nikolai, 156
Burke, Edmund) 287, 289
Buruma, Ian, 280
Bush, George W„ 12, 130,274
Buss, David) 316
Butler, Judith, 415, 416
Byatt.A. S.,419

Calvin and Hobbes, 187
Cambodia, 152. 155, 158
Canada. 16,311,331,333
cannibalism, 306-7, 320
capitalism, 161,246-47,290-91,297,
302-4,393

capital punishment, 181-82,331
Carey, Susan, 222
Carnegie, Andrew, 16
Carroll, Joseph, 417
Cash dan, Elizabeth, 342
categorization, 201-7, 228-29
Centers for Disease Control, 312
cerebral palsy, 99
Cezanne, Paul, 409

Chagnon, Napoleon, 115-19,314,323)
334)431

Chamberlain, Neville, 333
Chandigarh, 170
Cheers, 403
Chekhov, Anton, xi
child abuse, 164-65,308-9
child development:
chancein,396

family effects in, 249, 378-99
heritability oftraits in, 373-78
childrearing, seeparenting
chimpanzees, 45, 61—62,89, 134, 143,
316,367

Index/493

China, 152, 155,158,246
Chinese Revolution, 11, 152,155-58,

295

Chirot, Daniel, 170
Chomsky, Noam, 35, 36, 37-38, 55,
70,71,146-47,246-47,255,

300-301

Christian fundamentalism, 128-29
Chugani, Harry, 86
Chung, Connie, 375
Churchill, Winston, 296, 306, 333
Clark, Ramsey, 313
Clarke, Arthur C., 337
Claverie, Jean-Michel, 77
Clemenceau, Georges, 287
Clinton, Bill. 179,211,312,353,386
Clinton, Hillary, 179-80, 386, 394
cloning, 224, 225-26, 274
Club of Rome, 237
cognitive dissonance, 265, 294
cognitive psychology, 202-3
cognitive science, 31.417, 418
Cohen, Dov, 327, 328
collectivization, 246
combinatorial thought, 36—37,79-81,
236-39,299,335-36
Commentary, 130
communes, 246, 257-58
communism, seeMarxism
communism, primitive, 255
compositionality, 36-37, 80, 236—39,
335-36

computation, 31 -34
Computer Power and Human Reason
(Weizenbaum), 105
conditioning:

classical, 19,94,413
operant, 19, 169
Condorcet, Marquis de, 288
Conflict of Visions, A (Sowell), 287
conflict resolution, 58, 168,330-31,
332-36

conformity, 63-65, 271-72, 294
Confucius, 142, 193

connectionism, 21, 27-28, 35-36, 74-75,
78,79-82, 100

Conquest. Robert, 170
Conquest of Granada, The (Dryden), 6
conservatism, 128-33,283-305, 394
consilience, 30, 60, 68, 69-70
Consilience (Wilson), 108, 134
Constitution, U.S., 297-98
cooperation, 53,242-43, 255-59
Coren, Stanley, 121
cortex, 84, 87-100
auditory, 95-97
prefrontal, 100
ventromedial, 100
visual, 87-97, 99

Cosmides, Leda, 134,233,342,365
Council on Bioethics, 130
Co wen, Tyler, 403
creationism, 1-2, 128-30, 132-33
Crick, Francis, 30,41, 88
crime, 47, 50-51, 261-63, 286, 292-93,
304,306-7,310-12,315-17,326,
328-29,330-32

genetics and, 47, 50-51,176,178
peer groups and, 391-92
punishment and, 180-85,263,293,
330-32

see also rape; violence; psychopathy
Crime in America (Clark), 313
Crime of Imprisonment, The (Shaw), 181
Crime of Punishment, The (Menninger),

181

critical period, 387
critical theory, 198

Critique of Practical Reason (Kant), 193

Crittenden, Danielle, 339

Croce, Jim, 326

Cronin, Helena, 342

Cuban Missile Crisis, 334, 335

Cultural Revolution, 152

cultural studies, 198,213-14

culture:

autonomy of, 23-24, 27
differences in, 68-69
emotions and, 38-39
epidemiological models of, 65
learning of, 59-72
material success and, 67

494/Index

neural circuitry and, 60.
socialization and, 377, 391, 399
stability and change in, 66
Culture of Honor (Nisbett and Cohen),
327

Dahmer, Jeffrey, 263

Daly, Martin, 135,164-65, 182,254,304,
313,319,325,327
Damasio, Antonio, 99-100
Damasio, Hannah, 99-100
Daniels, Denise, 381
Danto, Arthur, 409
Darkness in El Dorado (Tierney), 116
Darrow, Clarence, 130
Darwin, Charles, 2, 15,28,30,51,66,
132,151,186,254,285,305
DarwinianLeft, A (Singer), 298, 300
Dawkins, Richard, 53, 112,113,114,191,
241,318-19
deafness, 95, 391

Death by Government (Rummel), 332
decision making, 40,42-44, 51, 58,
174-75,302-3

Declaration of Independence, 145
deconstructionism, 198,208,209
seealso postmodernism
Deep Blue, 33-34
Degler, Carl. 17
de Kenessey, Stefania, 417
Delaney Clause, 278
Delay, Tom, 129
democracy, 296-98
Denfeld, Rene, 343
Dennett, Dan, 10, 177,216
Derrida, Jacques, 208
Derriere Guard, 417
Descartes, Rene, 8, 9-10, 42, 126,215
determinism, 112-13, 122, 127,

174-85

deterrence, 180-85,324-29,330-32
Devil's Dictionary, The (Bierce), 240
DeVore, Irven, 111,238
de Waal, Frans, 168,298
Dialectical Biologist, The (Levins), 126
dialectical biology, 113,126,135

Dialogue Concerningthe Two ChiefWorld
Systems (Galileo), 138
Diamond, Jared, 68-69
Dickeman, Mildred, 342
Dickens, Charles, 291-92
Dickinson, Emily, 423-24
Dictator game, 256, 257
Didion, Joan, 342-43
difference feminism, 342
Discovery Institute, 161
discrimination, 141, 145-49,201-2,
204-7,214,217,311-12
age, 148

sex, 337-39, 341, 351, 354, 355, 357
Disney, Walt, 11
Disraeli, Benjamin, 287
Dissanayake, Ellen, 404-5, 406
Divale, W.T.,57
Dooling, Richard, 176
Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 41, 307
Double-Blind Dictator game, 257
Douglas, William 0., 181,265
Died Scott decision, 292
drug policies, 331-32
Dryden, John, 6
dualism,8-9,10

seealso Ghost in the Machine;
mind-matter divide; soul
Dunbar, Robin, 298
Durham decision. 184
Durkheim, Emile, 23-24, 25,108,156,
284,286,427

Dutton, Denis, 404,406-7, 415, 417
Dworkin, Andrea, 171,365
Dworkin. Ronald, 288

Eagly, Alice, 309
Easterlin, Nancy, 417
Eastwood, Clint, 219
economics:

behavioral,256-58,302-4
human nature as seen in, 256, 285-86,
302-3

intuitive, 221,233-36,302-3
education, 222-23, 235-36, 301
arts and humanities in, 401

Index /495

Ehrlich, Paul, 237
Einstein, Albert, 44, 410
Eiseley, Loren, 28
Ekrnan,Paul,39,107-8
Elbow Room (Dennett), 176-77
Eliot, T.S.,301,400
elitism, 149,301,425
Eliza, 105

Ellwood, Charles, 27
Elman, Jeffrey,35-36, 84
Elshtain, Jean Bethke, 342
Ember, Carol,S 7
emotions, 39-40,168
altruism and, 255
culture and, 38-39
morality and, 271-72
empiricism,S, 22, 23, 27-28, 34, 36,124
autism and, 62
seealso Blank Slate
employment, gender gap in, 351-61
Enemies, A Love Story (Singer), 431-34
Engels, Friedrich, 126, 127, 155,255
engineering, intuitive, 220
English language, 14-15,37-38,71
Enlightenment, 5-7, 10-11, 18,22,251,
337-38,341

environmentalism. 154, 162
Equal Protection clause, 298
Equal Rights Amendment, 340
equity feminism. 341, 343, 354, 363, 369
Essay Concerning Human Understanding,
An (Locke), 5-6
essentialism, 230, 231
Estrich, Susan. 353, 357
estrogen, 346, 348
ethnic groups:

genetic differences among, 143-44
neologisms for, 211-13
stereotypes about. 201-7
violence and, 315, 323
ethnocentrism, 294, 323
eugenics, 16, 109, 110, 115, 116, 132,

134, 141, 152-53
euphemisms, 211-13
European Union, 229
euthanasia, 227, 228

Evans, David, 417
Eve, 2

evolution, 2, 15,89,187,242

conservative critique of, 128-29,299
cooperation in, 58, 64,167,242-44,
255-259

creationism and, 132-33
genome and, 91
group selection and, 258-59
ofhumans, 16,53,238
intuitive faculties and, 223
see also natural selection
evolutionary psychology, 51-58, 68,
89-90,111,125,131,134,142,245,
296,299,303,341-42,389
arts and, 417. 418
deterrence and, 182,324-27
rape and, 359-60
stepparenting and, 164-65
Evolution of Human Sexuality, The
(Symons),114-15

Expanding Circle, The (Singer), 167,320
Expression of the Emotions in Man and
Animals, The (Darwin), 107-8
eyes, 51

Fagan, Jeffrey, 329
families:

in behavioral genetics, 378-87
conflict in. 247-51
love in, 245-47

and politics, 247, 266-68, 294, 427
see also parenting
Farah, Martha, 99
Faris, Ellsworth, 24
Faris, Robert, 27
Farley, Frank, 394
fate, 397-98

Fausto-Sterling, Anne, 346
Fear of Flying (Tong), 253
fears, 231

Feminine Mystique, The (Friedan), 351
feminism, 160, 161, 171-72,338-43
difference, 342

equity, 341,343,354, 363,369
gender, 341-43, 361-62, 365-66, 367

496/Index

Ferguson, Andrew, 131,133
feuds, 324-29,430-31
Feynman, Richard, 239
Fisher, Helen, 342, 355
Fiske.Alan, 233,247,257
Flynn, James, 206
Fodor, Jerry, 35, 80
folk psychology, see theory of mind
Food and Drug Act (1958),278
Forster, E. M., 296
Foucault, Michel, 415,416
Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth, 342
Frank, Robert, 259, 276, 303
Franklin, Benjamin, 168
Frazer, James George, 230
Freedman, Jonathan, 311
Freeman, Derek, 56, 115
free-rider problem, 257, 259
freewill, 127-28, 175-80,397
French Revolution, 159, 170,289,295
frequency-dependent selection, 260—6 1
Freud, Sigmund, 40,43,191,264,381,
410

Friedan, Betty, 171,351,353
Friedman, Milton, 287, 393
Furchtgott-Roth, Diana, 353

Gabriel, Peter, 403
Gage, Phineas, 42, 100
Galbraith, John Kenneth, 288
Galileo Galilei, 9-10,137-39,207
Galton, Francis, 16
game theory, 58,182,242-43,255-59,
323,334-35
Gardner, Howard, 222
Garfunkel, Art, 22
Gauguin, Paul, 409
Gazzaniga, Michael, 43
Geary, David, 222-23
Geertz, Clifford, 25, 208
Gell-Mann, Murray, 239
Gelman, Susan, 230
gender, see sex differences
gender feminism, 341— 1 43, 361-6i,
365-66,367
gender gap, 340, 351-61

generative grammar, 37-38,166,236,

336

genes:

antisocial acts and, 50-51
autism and, 46, 62
brain and, 49

crime and, 47,50-51,176,178
emergenic traits and, 152-53
intelligence and, 47, 106-7, 149, 150,
373-78

language and, 48,49
mental illness and, 46
Neel and, 116-17
personality and, 45-51, 373-78
"selfish,” 53, 191

violence and, 51,175,176,314,315
see also behavioral genetics
genetically modified foods, 229-30, 231
genetic variation, 49-50, 142—45, 373-74
genius, 44

genome,human,48,74,75-78,197,396
in denials of human nature, 74,
75-78,100,101-2
evolution and, 91
human complexity and, 77
number of genes in, 74, 75-78
variability in, 142-43
germ theory of disease, 154
Gestalt, 418
Ghiglieri, Michael, 166
Ghost in the Machine, 9,11,28-29,31,
133,224,243,293
determinism and, 174,175-76
genetics and, 51, 74
neural plasticity and, 87
neuroscience and, 42, 44,129
radical science defense of, 126-28
responsibility and, 184
right-wing support of, 128-29
Gibran, Kahlil, 249
Gigerenzer, Gerd, 302
Gilbert, William, 283
Gilligan, Carol, 171,342
Gilmore, Gary, 261
Gingrich, Newt, 244
Gintis, Herbert, 303, 304

Index /497

glass ceiling, 351-52
Glendon, Mary Ann, 272
Glover, Jonathan, 170,274,279,320-21,
335

Godfather, The, 182
Godwin. William, 11,287,288
Goffman, Erving, 264
Goldberg. Tiffany E, 178
Goldblum, Jeff, 264

Golden Rule, 168-69, 187-88, 193,224,
274-75,336
Goldin, Claudia, 353
Golding, William, 124
Goldman, Emma, 153
Good Morning America, 262
Gopnik, Adam, 217,416
gorillas, 367
Gorky, Maxim, 156
Gottfredson, Linda, 342, 353, 359
Gottschall, Jonathan, 417
Gould, Stephen Jay, 109, 111, 114, 122,
124-25,127,132,133,149,162-63
Gowaty, Patricia, 342
Graglia, E Carolyn, 339
Great Chain of Being, 137-39
Great Society, 286
Green, Ronald, 228
Greene, Graham, 245
Grogger, Jeff, 329
group mind, 26, 108, 158
seealso superorganism
group selection, 258-59
Group Socialization theory, 390-98
public reaction to, 392-95
Gulag Archipelago, The (Solzhenitsyn), 157
guns, 311

Guns, Germs, and Steel (Diamond), 68
Guns of August, The (Tuchman), 324,334
Gur, Batya, 246
Gur. Raquel, 342
Gypsies, 154

habit system, 40

Hacking, Ian, 202

Hadley, Robert, 80

Haidt, Jonathan, 270, 272, 273

Haldane, J.B.S., 153
Halpern. Diane, 121,342
Hamilton. Alexander, 287, 297
Hamilton, William, 108,. 109,111,244,255
Harris, Judith Rich, viii, 320, 381,385,
390,395-99
Harris, Marvin, 63-64
"Harrison Bergeron" (Vonnegut), 424-25
. Harvey, William, 30
Hatch, Orrin, 226
Hausman, Patti, 352, 353
Hawaiian language, 14-15
Hawkes, Kristen, 342
Hayek, Friedrich, 151,287,291,292
Healey, Bernadine, 314
Hebb, D.O.,92
Hegel, G. W. E, 284
Heisenberg, Werner, 410
Hepburn, Katharine, 163
heritability, 45-47,49-51,373-78
of intelligence, 47, 146-47, 150,297,
374-75,376-78
of political attitudes, 47, 283
Hernadi, Paul, 417

Herrnstein, Richard, viii, 106,146-47,302
Hillel, 193

Hillenbrand, Lynne, 358
Himrnelfarb, Gertrude, 130
Hinduism, 272
Hines, Melissa, 342
Hirshleifer, Jack, 259
Hitchcock, Alfred, 402
Hitler, Adolf, 153-55, 157,189
Hobbes, Thomas, 7-8, 33, 35, 56, 193,
285,287,296,318-19,322-24,325,
329-30,332,335
Hoffer, Eric, 63
Hogan, Patrick, 417

Holmes, Oliver Wendell, Ir„ 181,287,291
homosexuality, 44, 46, 93-94,154, 164,
201-2

honor, violent behavior and, 326-29,
428-31
Horace, 406
Horowitz, Donald, 333
How the Mind Works (Pinker), 80, 393

498 / Index

Hrdy., Sarah Blaffer,250, 342
Hubei, David, 97, 108
Huckleberry Finn, The Adventures of,
(Twain), 428-31

Human Genome Project, xi, 74, 75-78,
135,377

humanities, 6, 31, 60, 68, 69-72,75,134,
285,356,400-420

Human Universals (Brown), 435-39
Humboldt, Alexander von, 301
Hume, David, 79,178,180,279,296,

408

Hummel, John, 80
Hunt, Morton, 128
hunter-gatherer societies, 53, 63, 68,
233-34,294,306-7,316
Hurtado, Magdalena, 342
Huston, Anjelica, 432
hyperreality, 214

identity politics, 206-7
Ifaluk, 38-39

imagery, see psychology, of imagery
images, 213-18
imitation, 60-62, 63-65
immigration, 17,391
inequality, 141-58,304
infanticide, 227, 248-49
information, 31-34, 238
Inge, Dean, 287
Inherit the Wind, 130
Inquisition, 137
insanity defense, 183-84
intellectual property, 238
intelligence, 33,44, 106-7,238,375
denials of, 149-50

heritability of, 47, 146-47, 150,297,
374-75,376-78
multiple, 219

intelligence quotient (IQ) tests, viii,
106-7,134-35,145,146-47,201,
301-2,378

behavioral genetics and, 373, 379
Intelligent Design, 130,133
interest, lending at, 234-35
intuitive psychology, see theory of mind

Iroquois Federation, 296

Israel, 246, 257,311

It Takes a Village (Clinton), 394

Jackson, Andrew, 328

James, Oliver, 393

James, William, 19,56,203,417-18

Japan, 310,369,408

Japanese-Americans, 312

Japanese language, 37-38, 71

Jefferson, Thomas, 145

Jensen, Arthur, 107

Jespersen, Otto, 14-15,22

Jesus Christ, -193

Jews, 16,17,22,66, 130, 141,143, 152,
154,201,204,217,235,251,274,
431-32
Iivaro, 117-18

John Paul II, Pope, 130, 186,224

Johnson, Lyndon, 286, 292,298, 308, 313

Johnson, Philip, 130

Johnson, Samuel, 30,137,142,418

Jones, Owen, 165,176,367,371

long, Erica, 253,254

Joshua, 137

judicial activism, 291

Jumpers (Stoppard), 321-22

Junger, Sebastian, 258

junk DNA, 78

Just Society, 286

Kagan, Jerome, 394-95
Kahneman, Daniel, 302
Kamin, Leon, 112, 113,114, 122-23, 126,
378

Kaminer, Wendy, 342
Kant, Immanuel, 180, 193,287,301,
332-33

Kantor, J. R, 19-20
Karamazov, Dmitri, 85
Kasparov, Garry, 34
Kass,Leon, 130,133,274,339-40
Katz, Lawrence, 97-98
Keegan, John, 333
Keeley, Lawrence, .56,57
Keil, Frank, 230

Index /499

Kelly, Alice, 382
Kennedy, Edward M., 289-90
Kennedy, John E, 334
Kennedy, Randall, 331
Kennedy, Robert E, 287-88, 289-90,300
Kenrick, Douglas, 316
Kevles, Betty, 308
Kevles, Daniel, 308
Keynes, John Maynard, 153
Khmer Rouge, 152, 156
Khrushchev, Nikita, 334
kibbutzim. 246, 257, 346
Kimball, Roger, 130
Kimura, Doreen, 342
Kindlon, Dan, 309
Kleinfeld, Judith, 342, 353, 359
Klineberg.Otto, 27
Koch, Christof, 88
Koch, Robert, 154
Koertge, Noretta. 342
Kohlberg, Lawrence, 291
Kohn,Alfie,309
Komar, Vitaly, 408-9
Koss,Mary, 369, 370
Kosslyn, Stephen, 215
Kristol, Irving, 130-31
Kroeber. Albert, 23, 28,29,31,108, 156,
284

Kropotkin. Peter, 255
Kubrick, Stanley, 337
kulaks, 152, 158
IKung San, 56

Laframboise, Donna, 342
laissez-faire economics, 303
Landers, Ann, 47

language, 22-23, 37-38,48,49,60,

62-63,168,180,221,223,236,238,
391,406.410,415,417,426
acquisition of, 38, 39, 53, 60, 62-63,
70-7,391
brain and. 99
change in, 66, 71
levels ofanalysis of, 70-72
neural networks and, 81-83
thought and, 207-11,426

Laski, Harold. 153, 183
Lawrence, D. H., 159
Lazarus, Richard, 39
learnability theory, 101
Le Corbusier, 170-71
Lefkowitz, Mary, 342
left-handedness, 121
Lehrman, Karen, 343, 353
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 34
Lenin, V. 1.,152,156, 158
Leo, John, 394
Lepowsky, Maria, 339
Lessing, Doris, 343
leviathan, 7-8,318-319,330-32
Leviathan (Hobbes), 7,318-19
Levins, Richard, 126
Levi-Strauss, Claude, 285
Levy,Ierre, 342
Lewinsky, Monica, 211
Lewontin. Richard, 109,111, 112,

113-14,122-23,124,126,127,128,
133,255,378
liberal arts, 401-20
liberalism, 5, II, 103, 118, 153,281,
283-305,311,331,341,342,416
Lifelines: Biology BeyondDeterminism
(Rose), 115

Limits of Family Influence, The (Rowe), 381
Lincoln, Abraham, 145-46
Linguistic Determinism hypothesis,
207-8

linguistics, 14-15,35-39,154,208,
390-91,417
Lippmann, Walter, 201
Lipstick Lesbians, 343
living wills, 227
Lloyd, Alan, 264

Locke, John, 5-6, 12, 18, 19,34-35,79,
124.193,285,286,296,301
logic, 221,236
Lomax,Alan,JL, 108
Lordof the Flies (Golding), 124
Lorenz, Konrad. 124,324
Los Angeles Times, 211-12
Lott, John, 311

"Lottery in Babylon, The" (Borges), 59

SOD/Index

Loury, Glenn, 206
Love Canal, 278
Low, Bobbie, 342
Lowie, Robert, 26, 28, 29, 31
Lubinski, David, 356
luck, life paths and, 396
Lutz, Catherine, 38
Lyell,Charles, 30
Lykken, David, 381

McCarthy, Joseph, 119
McClelland, James, 21, 35, 74
McClintock, Martha, 342
McElroy, Wendy, 342, 363, 364, 370
McGinnis, John, 296, 297, 298
McGue, Matt, 376
McGuinness, Diane, 342
Machiavelli, Niccolo, 285
Machiavellian traits, 259-60
MacKinnon, Catharine, 171,365
Mcveigh, Timothy, 309, 311
Madison, James, 287, 296, 297-98
Maeterlinck, Maurice, 287
Mahabharata, 193
Mailer, Norman, 261—62
Mallon, Ron, 38
Malthus, Thomas, 236, 238
Man and Aggression (Montagu), 124
Mansfield, Harvey, 339
Man Who Came to Dinner, The , 403 .
MaoZedong, 11,65,126-27, 156, 158
Mapplethorpe, Robert, 414
March of Folly, The: From Troy to
Vietnam (Tuchman), 324
Marcos, Ferdinand, 56
Marcus, Gary, 80

Margaret Mead and Samoa (Freeman),
115

Marr, David, 70, 405
Martindale, Colin, 412
Marx, Karl, 127, 131, 155, 157, 161,255,
284,295,299,301
Marx Brothers, 402
Marxism, 106, 123, 126, 155-58, 170,
284,285,286-87,296,299,303,
341.411,427

Masters, Roger, 164,284,286
materialism, 123', 126, 187
Mating Mind, The (Miller), 407
Matrix, The, 215
Mayr, Ernst, 146,231
Mazursky, Paul, 432

Mead,Margaret,25,26,56,108,359,422

Mealey, Linda, 261, 342

media:

images in, 213-18
stereotypes in, 201, 204-6
violence and, 311
Mehler, Barry, 378
Melamid, Alexander, 408-9
Melzack, Ronald, 98

memory, 32, 40, 42, 203, 209-10, 214-16

Mencken. H. L.,26, 276

Mendel, Gregor, 30, 305

Mengele, Josef, 378

Menninger, Karl. 181

metaphor, 11, 209, 273, 313, 317

Mill, John Stuart, 18, 79

Miller, Geoffrey, 366, 407, 408

Miller, J.Hillis, 208

Miller, Kristen, 178

Milne, A. A., 175

mind:

as complex system, 39-40, 55
computational theory of, 31 -34
concept of 9-10, 31-34
dualism and,8-9, 10,223-27
East Pole-West Pole debate over,
35-36, 75,84,219-20

in Judeo-Christian theory of human
nature, 1

levels of analysis of, 70-71
limits of, 239

modules of, 39-41,101,123,166,
219-22

theory of, seetheory of mind
universal mechanisms in, 37-39
mind-matter divide, 8-11, 31-48
behavioral genetics and, 45-51
cognitive science and, 31-34
evolutionary psychology and, 51-58
neuroscience and, 41-45

Index 7501

mind-matter divide (continued)
see also dualism; Ghost in the
Machine; soul
Minogue, Kenneth, 170
Minsky, Marvin, 80
"Misbehavior of Organisms, The"
(Breland and Breland), 20
Mismeasure ofMan, The (Gould), 149
M'Naughten rule, 183-84
modernism, 170-71,409-13,417-18
Money, John, 349

Montagu, Ashley,24, 26, 27,124,134,
258,307

Monty Python's Flying Circus, 72
Moore, G. E„ 150
moralistic fallacy, 162-63, 178,313
moralization 275-77
morality, 269-80

basis of, 168-69, 187-90, 192-93,224,
274-75

cross-cultural differences in, 166-69,
271-75

emotions and, 271-72, 279
religion and, 186-90
science and, 103-4, 138-39
self-deception and, 264-66
universality of, 168-69, 187-88, 193,
271-75

Moral Majority, 276
moral progress, 166—68
Mount, Ferdinand, 246
Muller, Hermann, 153
Murdoch, Iris, 343,418-19
Murdock,George,24
Murray, Charles, viii, 302
-music, 402,403, 405, 409,410, 417
Mutual Assured Destruction, 325
mutualism, 242

Myth of the First Three Years, The
(Bruer),386-87

Napoleon I, emperor of France, 295
National Center for Science Education,
129

National Endowment for the Arts, 401
National Institute of Mental Health, 312

National Institutes of Health, 314
National Public Radio, 166
National Science Foundation, 359
Native Americans, 6,12,22-23,57,
115-19,124,212,296,298,332
Natural Classicism, 417
natural history, intuitive, 220
Natural History of Rape, A (Thornhill
and Palmer), viii, 161,359-69
naturalistic fallacy, 150, 162-63, 164
natural selection, 28, 50, 51-52, 54,55,
83,101,142,231,249
Dawkins on, 318-19
sex ratios and, 343
see also evolution
Navajo language, 37
Nazism, 153-58, 180-81,272-73
Neel, James, 115-19
Neill, A.S., 222
neologisms, 211-13
nepotism, 245-46, 253, 294
Nesse, Randolph, 264
neural development, 83-100, 227,
386-87,396-97

neural networks, 21,42, 78-83,92
neural plasticity, 44-45, 74, 83-100,
384-87

brain damage and, 98-100
of cortex vs. subcortical structures, 89
developmental biology and, 90-100,
386-87,396-97

primary sensory cortex and. 87-91,
93-94

neuroscience. 111. 131,341-42, 386-87
cognitive, 41-45
commercial applications of, 87
and Ghost in the Machine, 42,44,129
mind-matter divide and, 41-45
see also brain
Newell, Alan, 105
New Formalism, 417
New Know-Nothings, The: The Political
Foes of the Scientific Study of
Human Nature (Hunt), 128
Newman, Barnett, 413
Newton, Huey, III

502 I Index

Newton, Sir Isaac, 30

New Yorker, 46, 116,179

New York Review of Books, 109,262

New York Times, 86, 179,339,349,414

Nietzsche, Friedrich. 131, 139,207

nihilism, 269

religion concerns about, 186-90
secular concerns about. 190-94
Nim Chimpsky, 61
1984 (Orwell), 425-26
Nisbett, Richard, 327, 328
Nixon, Richard M„ 180,236,298
Noble Savage,6,26-27,31, 118,119,
162,261,293,381,421
communalism and, 255
evolution and. 55-56
feminism and, 339
neuroscience and, 44
radical science defense of, 124-26, 134
rape and, 362
violence and, 312,336
nonrival goods, 238
Non Sequitur (comic strip), 179
Notin Our Genes (Karnin), 112, 126
Nozick, Robert, 149, 151
nuclear weapons, 324, 325 .
number sense, 192,209-10,220,223
Nurture Assumption, The (Harris), viii,
381,392

Nussbaum, Martha, 172

Oakshott, Michael, 290
Ofili, Chris, 414

Oklahoma City bombing (1995), 309

olfactory (smell) system, 93

Onion, The, 41"4, 425

orangutans, 367

Ortega y Gasset, Jos£, 24, 308

Orwell, George, 321,425-28

Ozick, Cynthia, 343

Paddock,Paul,236-37
Paddock, William, 236-37
Paglia, Camille, 342, 343, 369-70
Paine, Thomas, 288
Painted Word, The, 414 '

paleontology, 55, 306
Palmer, Craig, viii, 161, 176,359-69
Papert, Seymour, 80
Parallel Distributed Processing

(Rumelhart, McClelland et al.), 21
parenting, viii, ix, x, 164-65, 171-72,
378-99

behavioral genetics and, 378-87
conflicts in, 249-51
individualized,387-90
sex differences in, 252-54, 345,350,357
stepparenting, 164-65
Parsons, Talcott, 285, 286
Pascal, Blaise,419
Passmore, lohn, 159
Pasteur, Louis, 154
Patai, Daphne, 342
Paul, Elizabeth, 253
peers, 390-92, 395-96, 399
Percy, Walker, 209
perfectability, 27, 159-:73
Perfect Storm, The (Junger), 258
Perry, Bruce, 171
personality, 46-51,135,373
socialization vs., 395
seealso traits
Petitto, Laura.fil, 95
phantom limbs, 98

philosophy, 5-13.18,22,23,33,34-35,
38-39,64-65,69-70,101,137-39,
145-48, 150-52, 159, 162,164,
166-68,169-70.172,174-78,
179-85,187-89,192-93,207,216,
227-29,239-40,274-75,279-80,
287-88,296-98,318-32,335-36,
337-38

Philosophy and Literature, 415
physical fallacy, 234
physics, 30,137,239
intuitive, 220, 223, 239
Picasso. Pablo, 409
Pindar,287

Piss Christ (Serrano), 414
Plato, 192,284,285
Plomin. Robert, 381
Pocahontas, 12

Index 1503

r

politics, 283-305
seealso convervatism; liberalism;
radical science movement
Pollack, William, 309
Pol Pot. 158

Pope, Alexander, 138,373
Popper, Karl. 151,287
population, 236-37
Population Bomb, The (Ehrlich),

237

Posner,’Richard, 287
postmodernism. 198,202,208,2'13,214,
216,285,411-17,426-27
reaction against, 416-17
Postrel, Virginia, 342
Poussaint, Alvin, 107
Pratto, Felicia, 342

prejudice, 141, 145-49,201-2,204-7,
212-13,214,217,337-39,341,351,
354,355

Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, The
(Goffman),264
price controls, 234
Principia Ethica (Moore), 150
Prisoner's Dilemma, 334-35
probability, sense of, 220, 231-33
Proctor. Robert, 154-55
Pryor, Richard, 262-63, 425
psychiatry, 181. 184
psychoanalysis, 40

see also Freud, Sigmund
psychology, 6,18-19,20,22,24,27-28,
69.169,181,183,184,191,214,
226,233,249,302,422-23
arts and, 404-9, 412,417
of categories, 201-7
developmental, 101,383-90
emotions studied in, 39-40,107-8,
221,243,255,271-75
genetics and, 50

of imagery, 215-16, 236,406,417
neuroscience and, 45
of perception, 199-201,214-15,405,
417

social, 63, 204-5, 233-34, 241,245,
247,255,256-58,264-66,270-75,

277-79,281-82,294,303-4,321,

327-28

stereotypes and. 201-2
see also associationism; behavioral
genetics; behaviorism; emotions;
evolutionary psychology; memory;
number sense; personality; theory
of mind

psychopathy, 51, 125,259-63,315
Public Enemy, 329
public goods, 256-58, 294
Public Opinion (Lippmann), 201
punishment, 180-85
Putnam, Hilary, 70, 149
Pygmalion effect, 206
Pylyshyn,Zenon,80

quantum mechanics, 239
Quartz, Stephen, 84
Quayle, Dan. 394

races:

possibility of genetic differences
among, 6, 15-18,67-69, 107,
143-44

and violence, 313, 314, 315
words for, 211-13
racial profiling, 148
racism, IS, 16-17, 108,145,149,202,
205,273

see also prejudice

radical science movement, 111-12,
121-39,146-47,153,293,366,
426-27

Rage Against the Machine, 246-47, 300
Raising Cain (Kindlon), 309
Ramachandran, V. S., 405
Rand,Ayn,255

rape, viii, 160-61, 162-63, 164,176,340,
346,359-71

evidence for sexual component of,
367-68

reduction of, 368-71
rational-actor theory, 303

see also economics, human nature as
seen in

504 I Index

Rawls, John, 150-51
Reagan, Ronald, 287
RealBoys (Pollack), 309
realism, naive, 199
recursion, 36-37, 79-81,236, 336
Redmond, Elsa, 118
reductionism, 10,69-72,112,113-14,
118,126-27

relativism, 23,172,198-201,202,208,
213-14,272-73,411,426-27
language and, 207-11
see also postmodernism
religion, 94, 128-33, 137,154; 166, 175,
182,186-90,224-28,240,246,247,
257,263,286,287,288
human nature and. 1-2
morality and, 138, 182,186-90
religiosity, 375

religious right, 128-33, 163-64, 175,250,
286,287

Republic (Plato), 285
responsibility, 131-33, 166, 174-85
retaliation, law of, 324-25
see also revenge

Rethinkinglnnateness (Bates and
Elman), 34-35,84
Return of Beauty, 417
revenge, 53,54, 180-82,322-29,428-31
Rhodes, Richard. 308-9
Rice, Mamie, 263,342
Richards, Robert, 154
Ridley, Matt, 256
risk, 231-33

Roback, Jennifer, 353, 357
robots, 61

seealso artificial intelligence
Rockefeller, John D., 16
Rockwell, Norman, 402
Roiphe, Katie, 343

Roman Catholic Church, 186-87,225
romanticism, 10, 154, 159-65,255,263,
264,300-301,331,413
see also naturalistic fallacy; Noble
Savage

Romer, Paul, 237
Roosevelt, Theodore, 153

Rorty, Richard, 202
Rose, Hilary, 255, 366
Rose, Steven, 111, 112, 113-14, 115,
122-23,124,126,127,133,255,
377-78

Rosencrantz and Guildenstem Are Dead
(Stoppard),317
Rossi, Alice, 342

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 6-8, II, 12,56,
159,193,285,287,288,296,301
Rowe, David, 381
Rozin, Paul, 230-31, 272, 275
Rumelhart, David, 21, 35, 74
Rummel, R. J.,332
Russell, Bertrand, 2, 26, 270
Russian Revolution, 295
Ryle, Gilbert, 9-10, 126

Sahlins, Marshall, 108-9, 135
St. Helena. 311
Salmon, Catherine, 342
Samoans, 56
Sanger, Margaret, 153
Sapir, Edward, 207-8
Sargent, John Singer, 160
Sarich, Vincent, 144
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 180
Satel, Sally, 342, 370
Saturday Night Live, 343
Saving Private Ryan, 160
Scandinavia, 16,47,71,315
Scarr, Sandra, 381
Scarry, Elaine, 417
Schelling, Thomas, 322
schizophrenia, 45-46, 215
Schlesinger, Laura, 164
Schwartz, Felice, 353
Schwarzenegger, Arnold, 226
science studies, 198
Scopes Monkey Trial, 130
Scott, Dred, 292
Scott, James, 170
Searle, John, 65, 327-28
Segal, Nancy, 47
Sejnowski, Terrence, 84
self, unified. 42-43

Index 1505

self-deception. Ill, 128,260-66,280,
290,293,294,295,301,324,325,
330,336,423-29

Selfish Gene, The (Dawkins), 112, 124,
241,242

selfishness, 50,52, 161-62, 163, 169-70,
190-91,242-45,246-47,255-63
Sen, Amartya, 237,272
Serrano. Andres, 414
Seville Statement, 307-8
sex differences, 142, 144-45, 171-72,
178-79,205,251-54,337-71,422,
433

in brain, 347
discomfort about, 351
gender gap and, 351-61
in parenting, 252-54, 350
in violence, 309-11, 316-17
women as researchers on, 342
sex discrimination, 16-17, 145, 148, 149,
202,205,273,337-39,341,351,
354,355,357
sexual assault, see rape
sexual behavior, 20, 54, 56, 60, 89, 112,
132,148,160,178-79,211,236,
252-54,267-68,271,273,276, 338,
344,348,356,360-63,367-68,
370-71

.sexual competition, 319, 346, 347
arts and, 407-8

sexual orientation, 44.46, 93-94, 154,
164,201-2

Shakespeare, William. 197,224,418
Shalit, Wendy, 339
Shastri, Lokendra, 80
Shatz, Carla, 91-92

Shaw, George Bernard, 153. 181,287-88,
423

Shaywitz, Sally, 342
Shepard, Roger, 199,200,405
Sherman, Cindy, 411
Shockley, William, 153
Shosha (Singer), 251
Shweder, Richard, 26, 272
sibling conflict, 248-250, 266-70,

389-90

sickle cell anemia. 144
sign language, 95-96, 391
Silk, Joan, 342
Silver, Ron, 432
Simon, Herbert, 105,302
Simon, Julian, 237
Simon. Paul, 22

Singer, Isaac Bashevis, 251, 431-34
Singer, Peter, 166-67,298,320
Skinner, B.E, 20,169,177,207,246
slavery, 6, 15, 109, 144. 145, 155, 156,
292,298,329,338
Slavs, 154
Sledgehammer, 403
slippery slopes, 228-29
Slovic, Paul, 231,302
Small, Meredith, 342
smell (olfactory) system, 93
Smith, Adam, 161,233,285,287,288,
290,302

Smith, Edgar, 262

Smith, John Maynard, 108, 167,284

Smith, Susan, 189

smoking, 275, 373, 391,393

Smolensky, Paul, 80

Smothers Brothers, 250

Smuts, Barbara, 342

Sober, Elliot, 259

social constructionism, 6,17,22-29,31,
38,40,134,198,327,341,393
social contract, 8, 150-51, 193,285-86,
296,330

Social Contract, The (Rousseau), 8
Social Darwinism, 16, 103, 109, 134, 141,
149,150,152,157,162,425
Hitler's belief in, 153,157
social engineering, 158, 169-73
socialism, 257
see also Marxism
socialization, personality vs., 395
social psychology, see psychology, social
social reality, 64-65, 327
social sciences, 6

sociobiology, 6,17,22-29,31,53,60,67,
109,124,135,201,207,249,
284-85,301,307-8,342,354,419

S06/lndex

Sociobiology (Wilson), 108-11, 115. 124,
284,285

sociology, 23,27,284-85,286
Socrates, 23
Sokal, Alan, 410
Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr. 157
Sommers, Christina Hoff, 172,341,342
Sontag, Susan, 343
soul, 8-9, 10,28-29,31, 133, 186-87,
224-27,243,293
seealso Ghost in the Machine
South Africa, 321
Southerners, 328,428-31
Soviet Union, 152, 155, 158,246,
286-87,310,331,334,410
Sowell, Thomas, 287, 295
Spanish Civil War, 321
spatial sense, 220
Specter, Arlen, 312
speech-recognition software, 106
Spencer, Herbert, 15-16, 150
Sperber, Dan, 65
Sperry, Roger, 43
Spock, Benjamin, 20
Sponsel, Leslie, 115-19
sports, 317

Springsteen, Bruce, 179
Stalin, Joseph, 152, 158,295
Standard Social Science Model, 67, 69
seealso social constructionism; social
sciences

StardustMemories, 49
statistics, 231-32

status, 21,39,52,65,106-7, 110,128,
217,223,250,273-74,293,302-5,
319, 326-29, 345,355,356,358,
386,390,405,406-8,416
Stein, Gertrude, 417-18
Steinem, Gloria, 171,343,353
Steiner, George, 266,415, 431
Steiner, Wendy, 417
stem cell research, 12,224,226
Stephen, James, 182
stepparenting, 164-65
stereotypes, 201-7
Stevens, Wallace, 236

Stich, Stephen, 38
Stills, Stephen, 253
Sting, 253

Stockhausen, Karlheinz, 416
Stoicism, 193
Stolba, Christine, 353
Stoppard, Tom, 317,321-22
Storey, Robert, 417, 420
strict constructionism, 291
Strossen, Nadine, 342
Sullivan, Andrew, 348
Sullivan, Arthur, 283
Sulloway,Frank, 381,389
Summerhill (Neill), 222
Superfund Act (1980),278
superorganism (group mind), 26,108,
158,172,244,255,284,296,309,427
supervisory attention system, 40
Supreme Court, U.S., 129,291
Sur, Mriganka, 85, 95
Switzerland, 311
symbiosis, 242

Symons. Donald, 114-15,252,267-68,
272-73

Szathmary, Eors, 167

Take Our Daughters to Work Day, 339,
352

Taliban, 254
Tasmania, 69
Taylor, Joan Kennedy, 342
Tay-Sachs, 144

technology, 68-69, 221, 237-39, 338
Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, 242
testosterone, 316, 328; 347-48
see also androgens
Tetlock, Philip, 277, 278
thalamus, 44, 87, 92, 95-96, 98
Thaler, Richard, 302
Thatcher, Margaret, 286, 287, 293
theory ofmind, 61-63, 220, 223-24,228
art and, 412, 417
chimpanzees and, 61-62
culture learning and, 61-63
Theory of Moral Sentiments, The
(Smith),288

Index /507

Thomas, Elizabeth Marshall, 56
Thornhill, Nancy Wilmsen, 342
Thornhill, Randy, viii, 161, 176,

359-69

thought, language and, 207-11

"Thousand and One Nights, The," 419

Thucydides, 322

Tierney, Patrick, 115-19

Tiger, Lionel, 111

Tilghman, Shirley, 358

Tinbergen, Niko, 70

tobacco industry, 275, 393

Todorov, Tzvetan, 134

Tolstoy,Leo, 247-48

Tooby, John, 134,233-34,238,365

toolmaking, 220, 238, 323

Tootsie, 403

totalitarianism, 152. 155, 158, 169-70,
296,425-28

trade, 167-69,233-36,255-56,290-91,
297,320
Traffic, 276

Tragic Vision, 287-305
traits:

emergenic,152-53
heritability of, 45-47, 49-51, 373-78
Machiavellian, 259-60
Trivers, Robert, 108, 111,241,244,248,
251-52,263-64,266,271,301,319,
343,389

Trudeau, Pierre, 286
Truman, Harry S., 175
Tuchman, Barbara, 324
Turkheimer, Eric, 372, 379
Turner, Lrederick, 410-11,417
Turner, Mark, 417
Turner, Terence, 115-19
Turner's syndrome, 349
Tversky.Amos, 302
Twain, Mark, 428-31
twin studies, 46-48, 98, 102, 142, 146,
374-77,378-79,396,397
2001: A Space Odyssey, 337

Ultimatum game, 256
United Nations, 27, 307, 308. 360

United States, 2,16,57,144,153,205,
257,306,307,311,330,333,334,338
Universal Declaration of Human Rights,
167

Universal Grammar, 37-38, 55
Universal People, 55
universals, human, 37-38, 55,435-39
see also specific topics
Updike, John, 431
urban renewal, 170-71
usury, 235
utopianism, 169-70
Utopian Vision, 287-305

Valian, Virginia, 206
Vanatinai, 339
van Buren. Abigail, 47
van Gogh, Vincent, 407, 409-10
Vasquez, John, 323-24
Veblen, Thorstein, 406, 407, 414
vegetarianism, 227-28, 275, 320
Venter, Craig, 75-76
Verbal Behavior (Skinner), 207
Vietnam War, 160,298,326
violence, 44, 56-58, 294, 306-36
fear and, 322-26
feuds and, 430-31
honor and. 326-29
morality and, 318-22
prevention of, 330-32
as public health problem, 312
Violence Initiative, 314
visual illusions, 199-201
visual system, 51-52, 87-97,99,
199-201,214-15
arts and, 405,412,417-18
Vonnegut, Kurt, 424-25

Waddington, C. H., 109
Wald, George, 153
Walker, Rebecca, 343
Wallace, Alfred Russel, 28. 42
WarAgainstBoys, The (Sommers), 172
Ward, Elizabeth. 383
warfare, 125, 160,306-7,321,322,324,
326,333-36

50B/lndex

Warhol, Andy, 411
Warren, Earl, 181,288,291
Watson, John B.,.19,20, 24, 30, 77,
123-24,207

Wealth of Nations, The (Smith), 233
Webb, Beatrice, 153,301
Webb, Sidney, 153,301
Weber, Max, 284
Weizenbaum, Joseph. 105-6,279
welfare, 290, 304
Wells, H. G., 153
Wertheim, Margaret, 366, 393
West, John, 129
West Side Story, 179
White, Leslie, 25, 26
Whitney Museum, 217,411, 417
Who, The, 209, 295
Whole Language, 222
Whorf, Benjamin, 207-8
Who Stole Feminism (Sommers), 341
"Who Will Bell the Cat?" (Aesop), 256
Wiesel, Torsten, 97. 108
Wilkinson, Milton J., 335-36
Wilkinson,FUchard,304
Williams, George, 108, 163,244,255,258
Wilson, David Sloan, 259
Wilson, E.O., 30,108-12,113,114,124,
132,134,284,285,293,296,405
Wilson, Margo, 164-65, 182,254,304.

313,319,325,327,342
Wilson, Woodrow, 201
"Wisdom of Repugnance, The" (Kass),
274

Witelson, Sandra, 342
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 207
Wohler, Friedrich, 30
Wolfe. Tom, 131-33,407,414
women:

biblical view of, 2

interests of, 172,337-38,357-59,361,
363,365,370-71
Taliban and, 254
U.S. Constitution and, 298
see also feminism; sex differences
Wooldridge, Adrian, 301, 302
Woolf, Virginia, 404, 409, 413
Words and Rules (Pinker), 81
Wordsworth, William, 159,170,295,

373

World War 1,160,201,323,324,334,335
World War 11, 27, 37, 57, 153, 155,205,
235,322,333,334
World Wide Web, 71,402
Wrangham, Richard, 324
Wright, Robert, 133-34, 167, 168,245,
320

Yanomamo, 115-19,314,323,334,431
Yeats.William Butler, 167
Young, Cathy, 342, 353, 360
Yugoslavia, 331

Zahavi, Amotz, 406
Zimbardo, Philip, 321
Zing Yang Kuo, 20
Zippy, 351

Index 1509

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